Goals & Scope

Goals

The BII initiative aimed to address interoperability issues in European public procurement, by developing technical specifications to implement e-Procurement processes in a compatible manner across the EU.

The mission of the CEN BII Workshop was to spread and facilitate the use of e-Procurement standards for buyers and suppliers, and especially public administrations, by:

  • identifying requirements (including legal requirements) regarding e-procurement standards;
  • providing a general framework for the organisational and semantic levels of the electronic procurement documents;
  • supporting the implementation of commonly applied international e-procurement standards;
  • providing organisational support to ensure the governance and maintenance for those requirements during the lifetime of the workshop.

This has been achieved by focusing on business requirements expressed in the European market and provide guidance to implementation projects on how relevant international standards may be applied in order to meet those requirements.

The Workshop activities supported the actions of the Digital Agenda for Europe (Pillar II: Interoperability and Standards) by ensuring that e-Procurement solutions and services based on BII specifications can interact seamlessly anywhere.

Scope

The Workshop deliverables provide a basic framework for interoperability in pan-European electronic transactions expressed as a set of technical specifications that cross-reference relevant international activities. The scope is public procurement but the specifications apply as well to private trade.

The BII specifications are expressed as a set of “profiles” for specific parts of the public procurement processes, and include validation tools to implement them correctly. The figure below illustrates the scope of work, in terms of the phases of the procurement processes that require interoperability between the users.

scope_flow

The specifications are documented as CEN Workshops Agreements (CWAs)  – developed during Phase 2 of the workshop  – and are freely available for use, as follows:

  • 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 e-catalogue 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.

For detailed information please see CEN BII deliverables.