The BII initiative, established as a workshop under CEN, was initially launched in May 2007. BII should be seen as an initiative to help achieve the Digital Single Market by fostering implementation of e-procurement and e-invoiceing in Europe, and especially in the European public sector.
The vision of the workshop is that all organizations – independent of whether they are public or private and whatever their size and nationality – are enabled to conduct electronic business in an effective and efficient manner, significantly lowering costs for transaction processing.
The CEN WS/BII Workshop mission is to spread and facilitate the use of e-procurement standards by suppliers and buyers, and especially public administrations, by:
- identifying business requirements (including legal requirements) regarding e-procurement standards;
- providing a general framework for the organizational and semantic levels of interoperability for the electronic procurement documents;
- supporting the implementation of commonly applied international e-procurement standards;
- providing organizational support to ensure the governance and maintenance for those requirements.