Standards Development

Scope

This document provides specifications on transactions for exchanging electronic documents as part of the business processes and procedures in the pre-award area.

The activity will firstly define the business terms of a transaction and map these information entities to the eProcurement Ontology to ensure semantic interoperability. Thereby it will structure the information entities involved into comprehensible transactions that can facilitate the data exchanged between the actors involved in the pre-award processes. Throughout the process of transaction development, it will be necessary to identify controlled vocabularies that support the use information entities in a structured way and to describe the business rules that govern the use of information entities.

The transactions that are developed for the pre-award procedures (e.g. Open Procedure and Restricted Procedure) will be furthermore supported by a Procedural Architecture and Guidelines for Pre-Award Procurement. The processes and transaction in focus of this activity are described in the following.

eAccess: Electronic access to procurement documents and specifications, including electronic access to supporting documents for sellers in the preparation of a Tender response. This includes expressing interest in a business opportunity to be listed in the procurement procedure. The following transactions are of specific relevance for the phase and shall be assessed by the project:

 Subscribe to Procedure

 Subscribe to Procedure Confirmation

 Unsubscribe to Procedure

 Unsubscribe to Procedure Confirmation

 Procedure Status Inquiry

 Call for Tenders

 Invitation to Tender

 Pre-Award Catalogue Request

 Call for Tender Questions

 Call for Tender Answers

eSubmission: the business process and activities related to secure submission of tenders, qualifications and/or catalogues in electronic format to the buyer (contracting authority/contracting entity), which can receive and process it in compliance with applicable legal requirements. The following transactions are of specific relevance for the phase and shall be assessed by the project:

 Tender Submission

 Pre-Award Catalogue Response

 Tender Reception Notification

 Qualification Submission

 Qualification Reception Notification

 Tender/Qualification Withdrawal

 Tender/Qualification Withdrawal Notification

eEvaluation: Evaluation of the electronic tenders, qualifications and/or catalogues received by the buyer following the closing deadline of a qualification process or tender competition, including electronic exchange to enable the clarification of tender and qualification content by evaluations. This includes support for the process to reject a qualification document for a particular reason or that an economic operator has been invited to submit a tender or that a tender has been rejected or awarded to a particular economic operator. The following transactions are of specific relevance for the phase and shall be assessed by the project:

 Tender Clarification Request

 Tender Clarification

 Qualification Rejection

eAwarding: Information exchange regarding the assessment results of submitted documents. The following transactions are of specific relevance for the phase and shall be assessed by the project:

 Awarding Notification

Purpose

This document provides specifications on business transaction for exchanging electronic documents as part of the business processes in the pre-award area to better cover the standardization aspects in the full end-to-end eProcurement process.

Justification

In its 2023 Rolling Plan for ICT standardization the Commission states that “Public procurement must ensure best value for money, while being transparent and simple as well as meeting environmental, innovative and social objectives. e-Procurement is a key tool to achieve these goals.

The 2014 Public Procurement Directives make e-Procurement the main method for carrying out public procurement. Since April 2016, electronic notification and electronic access to tender documents have been mandatory; e-submission of tenders became mandatory for all buyers in October 2018.

Standards can offer solutions to these problems, as they can improve data portability, reduce the costs of understanding new systems and enable communication across systems.

CEN/TC 440 was established in 2015 to cover the standardization aspects in the full end-to-end eProcurement process (with exception of eInvoicing, which is covered by CEN/TC 434). Being targeted at European eProcurement the deliverables of CEN/TC 440 will be developed to support EU strategies and EU legislation.

Following the EC grant call CEN/TC 440 will prioritise the development of standards and standardisation deliverables in the pre-award procurement phase, which are in scope of the transition to end-to-end eProcurement foreseen under the 2014 Public Procurement Directives. Art. 22 of the Public Procurement Directive 2014/24/EU provides: “Member States shall ensure that all communication and information exchange under this Directive, in particular electronic submission, are performed using electronic means of communication in accordance with the requirements of this Article. The tools and devices to be used for communicating by electronic means, as well as their technical characteristics, shall be non-discriminatory, generally available, and interoperable with the ICT products in general use and shall not restrict economic operators’ access to the procurement procedure “(paragraph 1).

The Pre-Award area has not been covered in the initial CEN/TC 440 business plan. To take into consideration and fulfil the needs addressed by DG GROW, the CEN/TC 440 business plan has been revised and complemented by the Pre-Award area following up the needs addressed by DG GROW.

The implementation of the Pre-Award area in the work programme of CEN/TC 440 requires the activation of the CEN/TC 440 PreAward structures, the identification of necessary standards and deliverables in the Pre-Award area, their elaboration as well as public notices on their publication. The project thereby will define of a set of transactions for handing related data content definitions of the various tendering documents.

This New Work Item Proposal is already listed as a WG 4 prioritized deliverable in the approved CEN/TC 440 business plan: https://standards.cencenelec.eu/BPCEN/1976650.pdf