Activities

The BII Workshop was a Technical Body of the wider CEN community. CEN, the European Committee for Standardisation, is one of the three European Standardisation Organizations (CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI) responsible for developing and ratifying standards at European level. European standards can be implemented on a voluntary or mandatory basis.

CEN Workshops are particularly relevant in emerging and rapidly changing technologies that require quickly-developed specifications. They produce CEN Workshop Agreements (CWAs).

The core activity of the BII Workshop was to collect European business requirements for electronic procurement and to provide guidance for consistent implementation of these requirements using existing international standards, such as UN/CEFACT and OASIS UBL.

In particular, BII provided a framework for interoperability in pan‐European e-procurement transactions, expressed as a set of requirements and technical specifications, referred as ‘CEN BII profiles’. The actual implementation of the BII profiles is carried out by the user communities such as PEPPOL – at international level – and in European government agencies in Norway, Sweden, Ireland and Iceland.

The illustration below shows the relationship between standards, specifications and implementation, based on a consistent LifeCycle Management process (LCM).

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