Impact
The main purpose of the project is to gain-real life experience with e-Invoicing at the European Commission, and share the lessons learnt and re-usable components. Ultimately, the goal is to help stimulate the adoption of e-Invoicing in Europe.
Today (28/10/2009), we support e-Invoicing, including disputes and credit notes (the CEN/BII profile "Invoice with Dispute"). A first pilot was run in spring 2009 and conformance tests are being finalized now, allowing a number of suppliers to go into production very soon.
The team will start developing e-Ordering and e-Catalogue functionality and is also working on an open-source version which includes a connector to the PEPPOL infrastructure.
Track record of sharing
The Analysis of Business Requirements for eInvoicing in a Public Procurement Context is available at http://www.epractice.eu/en/library/288906
The demo movie of the prototype ("Basic Invoice") is available on YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azLeZIorrDs&fmt=18
The demo movie of e-PRIOR including "Invoice with Dispute" supporting e-Invoicing, disputes and credit notes is available on http://www.epractice.eu/en/tv/290845
The e-Catalogue Feasibility Study: http://www.epractice.eu/en/library/297017
A lot of information has been shared with PEPPOL and the cooperation with PEPPOL has now been formalised through the development of Open e-PRIOR and the PEPPOL Connector, see http://www.peppol.eu/Download/presentations/pan-european-eprocurement-with-peppol/20091021-peppol-conference-7-eprior-joao
Project results have been presented to the EC Expert Group on e-Invoicing, see http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/einvoicing/index_en.htm
The project has been shared with other initiatives, such as the IDABC e-Procurement Expert Group, CEN e-Invoicing2 and UBL International
Lessons learnt
A first pilot exercise was run with a handful of suppliers, between February and April 2009. The pilot included the following suppliers and service providers:
- BT through B2Boost
- Systemat through Advalvas
- Dell through Inovis
- Belgacom, Electrabel and Siemens through Certipost
The following lessons learnt or conclusions were identified
- e-PRIOR is a sound infrastructure for e-Invoicing at the Commission; this was one of the main goals of this particular pilot exercise.
- A lot of time is required to sign the Interchange Agreement: legal departments must be involved, it is still a paper-based process, ... During the pilot, a Simplified Interchange Agreement was drafted, clarifying that the paper invoice is still the legal invoice and the e-Invoice is only for "testing" purposes. Once we go into production with a supplier, a final Interchange Agreement needs to be signed, where the e-Invoice is the legal and only invoice.
- A formal Kick-Off meeting is relevant: It certainly helps setting the expectations towards the suppliers.
- Suppliers seemed not to know or find their own Global Location Number (GLN from GS1). All the suppliers had one, but often, the e-PRIOR support team had to look them up. We consider the VAT number as alternative party identification number.
- Priorities of a supplier have an impact on the pilot timing and results: some suppliers were much faster or more pro-active than others, often depending on their own priorities.
- The internal customer must be involved: for approval of semantic mapping, of scenarios and of business rules.
- The number of support calls decreases with a good understanding of the Interface Control Document (ICD, available on CIRCA): technical specifications are described in the ICD, but we often received questions where the answer was already in the ICD. We tried to improve our specifications by adding FAQs.
- The mapping of the suppliers’ data format to the UBL format was relatively easy.
- The environment of the Supplier or third party service provider can have an impact on the pilot progress.
See also http://www.peppol.eu/Download/public-procurement-for-the-future-conference/plenum-20th-may-2009-didier-thunus
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