The BII initiative

Business Interoperability Interfaces for public procurement in Europe (BII)

 

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.

 

At the closing CEN WS/BII (phase 1) a CWA in five parts was approved for publication  as a concrete contribution in line with several EU policies and initiatives at the time (the Lisbon Agenda, eEurope 2005: An information society for all; the Manchester Declaration; the i2010 programme; Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) 5; Action Plan for e-procurement). The same CWA also served as basis for implementations targeting European stakeholders through initiatives such as the PEPPOL project and all the related initiatives in individual countries, the ePRIOR and Open ePRIOR projects as well as other projects and initiatives.

 

Following the successful adoption of the deliverables of the first phase of the BII workshop, and on inputs collected from several stakeholders, a second phase of the Workshop was launched in 2010. Throughout its lifecycle, the second phase of the BII Workshop focused on capturing new (and refining the existing) business requirements. The Workshop also worked to express those requirements independent of any specific syntax, and – in order to make this result usable, to link the requirements to some of the most commonly used open standards, binding them to the syntax of OASIS UBL and UN/CEFACT. The results from the second phase of the Workshop were published in February 2013, as 5 CWAs:

  • CWA 16558; BII Architecture; Describing the methodology applied by the workshop and documenting generic topics relevant to all phases of the procurement process.
  • CWA 16559; BII Tender Notification profile; Describing how a generic BII profile may be used to support the notification phase of public procurement.
  • CWA 16560; BII Use of profiles in the tendering process; Describing how BII profiles may be used to support the tendering phase of public procurement.
  • CWA 16561; BII eCatalogue profiles; Describing how BII profiles may be used to support the provision of catalogues both in the pre-and post-award phases of public procurement.
  • CWA 16562; BII Post-award profiles; Describing how BII profiles may be used to support the activities within the post-award phases of public procurement.

 

During the lifetime of the CEN WS/BII2 the use of its deliverables continued to spread throughout Europe: the PEPPOL project, ePRIOR, and several national e-procurement initiatives in e.g. Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Spain and Italy. The second phase of the BII Workshop was thus again providing a concrete contribution to a number of EC policies and initiatives, such as the 2009 ICT Standardization Work Program, the eTendering Expert Group (eTEG), the proposal for a new Public Procurement Directive and the new Invoicing Directive, the Multi stakeholder Forum on e-invoicing, the Road map for e-invoicing in the Public Sector, the identification of the notification information based on the last public procurement Regulation 842/2011.

 

Based on the fact that the BII Workshop already has provided tangible contributions and results to the use of e-procurement and e-invoicing across Europe, its participants and stakeholders have realised that there is a need to continue these activities. The third phase of the workshop – CEN WS/BII3 – was thus initiated in March 2013. The CEN WS/BII3 will continue the work initiated by CEN WS/BII, and further refined under CEN WS/BII2, to support interoperable electronic procurement and business (e-procurement and e-business) solutions. To achieve this, CEN WS/BII3 has the objective to provide increased value to the BII user community, by:

  • Filling the gaps to ensure that all relevant aspects of e-procurement are covered;
  • Facilitate increased use through capacity building;
  • Facilitate the implementation of BII by coordinating with standardization bodies to ensure that the (European) requirements defined in BII are considered;
  • Securing the continued relevance of the BII deliverables by providing a focal point for governance and lifecycle management.

 

In order to provide increased value to its stakeholder CEN WS/BII3 will continue technology neutral approach by focusing on identifying and capturing business requirements expressed in the European market and to provide guidance to implementation projects on how relevant international standards may be applied in order to meet those requirements. The continued work in CEN WS/BII3 is thus again relevant for, and supports, a number of the on-going and future EC initiatives, e.g.:

  • The Commission Communication of 20 April 2012 (COM(2012) 179) on “a strategy for eprocurement”
  • The 2010-2013 ICT Standardisation Work Programme for industrial innovation, 2nd update – 2012,
  • The Commission’s “Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and the Council on electronic invoicing in public procurement” of June 2013 (COM (2013) 449).
  • The “Recommendations for effective Public e-Procurement” by the e-Tendering Expert Group (e-TEG)
  • The Commission Communication of 26 June 2013 “End-to-end e-procurement to modernise public administration” (COM (2013) 453 final)
  • The newly launched large scale pilot project, e-SENS “Electronic Simple European Networked Services”

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