Open e-PRIOR (electronic PRocurement, Invoicing and ORdering) has been published as open source by the Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission. The software has been made available at the OSOR Forge, the open source software development platform of the Commission.

The software is aimed at the public administrations that wish to try out electronic procurement, including cross-border procurement.

The software is meant to bridge the legacy systems used by public administrations and the systems of their suppliers. João Rodrigues Frade, one of the IT architects involved with e-PRIOR, explains that "Public authorities can use Open e-PRIOR to manage their procurement processes electronically. They can use it to receive catalogues digitally, they can submit their orders on-line and they can manage their invoices this way, simply by exchanging electronic business documents."

The system is built respecting specifications meant to facilitate public procurement, and that focus on cross-border interoperability, specifications elaborated by a workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public procurement in Europe (CEN BII).

Open e-PRIOR should also make it easy to connect to the Pan-European Public eProcurement On-Line project (Peppol), since it will come with a built-in Peppol gateway.

However, this Peppol gateway is not included on the version that was published on the OSOR Forge last November 2009, says Frade. "What we made available is a sneak-preview for the European Member States."

He hopes that many public administrations will try out the e-Prior tool. "I hope they will join the OSOR Forge, so they can take part in the development."

e-PRIOR is published using the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

The DIGIT initiative supports the objectives of the i2010 e-Government Action Plan, aimed to accelerate e-Procurement adoption in Europe. 

 

Further information 

• Original news article - OSOR.EU
• Open e-PRIOR - OSOR.EU forge
• e-PRIOR case in ePractice