On 17 May 2011, two invoices were sent by British Telecom using the PEPPOL* Infrastructure and were successfully received in production by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT).
British Telecom (BT) has been sending electronic invoices to DIGIT since 2009 using the e-PRIOR solution, via their service provider B2Boost. e-PRIOR is a service-oriented platform, developed by DIGIT, allowing suppliers to exchange with the European Commission and its Institutions standardised eProcurement documents via a secured communication channel. An open-source version of e-PRIOR, called Open e-PRIOR is freely available to the Member States and can be implemented in any public administration.
PEPPOL is an EU-funded initiative aiming at implementing an infrastructure based on common standards to enable EU-wide public eProcurement. DIGIT has developed a PEPPOL Access Point to allow the exchange of the e-PRIOR documents through the PEPPOL network. For instance, electronic invoices sent by the supplier can be transferred through the PEPPOL Access Point to e-PRIOR, which is connected to the customer back-office. The same Access Point is embedded in Open e-PRIOR.
B2Boost has sent the two invoices of BT to the PEPPOL Access Point of DIGIT, using PEPPOL's START client. Both parties have used PEPPOL's reference implementation. This production transaction is an important milestone in the broader adoption of eProcurement across Europe, spreading the use of interoperable and standard solutions and thus opening the gate to significant cost savings, increased efficiency and environmental-friendly procurement.
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