The European Commission IDABC eInvoicing and eOrdering project team has recently reached an important milestone: the delivery of the prototype. It allows the sending of an XML invoice to the Commission’s e-PRIOR system and the automatic integration in the back-office system after a number of validations. The major next step is a real-life pilot with a number of IT suppliers.
The e-PRIOR (electronic PRocurement, Invoicing and ORdering) prototype has been developed inside the Commission’s infrastructure and is hosted in its datacentre.
The prototype currently supports:
- the sending of an XML invoice through secured web services;
- the sending of a separate attachment;
- the sending of a status request message, which returns the status of the invoice.
User access, logging and a business document viewer have also been implemented.
The prototype was demonstrated to the IDABC programme’s Technical Working Group and formally endorsed by the ‘Pan-European eGovernment Services Committee’ (PEGSCO) which is the IDABC programme’s management committee.
The next project phase includes:
- Running a real-life pilot with a number of existing IT and telecom suppliers;
- Organising a post-pilot workshop to share the lessons learnt of the pilot;
- Developing additional use cases, including disputes and credit notes;
- Analysing the eOrdering process.
This phase should be completed before the summer holiday of 2009. During the final phase, the pilot will be extended with the additional use cases whilst the eOrdering process is being developed.
Final step
As a final step, all project deliverables will be packaged for dissemination. Collaboration with other eInvoicing and standardization initiatives is seen as very important, and contributions have been made to:
- The Expert Group on eInvoicing
- The PEPPOL project
- The CEN/BII workshop, where the IDABC eInvoicing and eOrdering project team is now even chairing the subgroup working on the usage of code tables.
A major contribution has been made towards the redefinition of the profiles, making them modular and complementary, resulting in decoupling the profiles from any message standard like UBL or UN/CEFACT.
Where applicable or possible, concepts and tools have been re-used from Member States, such as the NES/UBL XML formats and profiles, stylesheets and validator tools. Member States will equally be able to re-use deliverables and results from this project, such as XML definitions, stylesheets, approaches or concepts, programming code and architecture documents.
Further information:
e-PRIOR case in ePractice IDABC website
eProcurement news & good practice
e-PRIOR demo on You Tube
source: www.epractice.eu
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