The European Commission is setting the example by making its software for electronic procurement available as open source, said Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, at a conference yesterday. This includes Open e-Prior and Open Peppol, both available on the EC's open source repository, Joinup.
Barnier spoke at the end of the First Annual Conference on Electronic Procurement, hosted by the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday. The Commissioner said that modernising procurement should include simplification of the rules and lowering of the threshold for small and medium-sized businesses.
He expects that electronic procurement will do more than improve competition. "It will help to make government more efficient. It also improves integrity of and traceability of the process, and that deters corruption, which we all know often happens in public procurement." He added that technology by itself will not transform government. "Change requires courage and political will. But technology is one of the tools for change."
The conference showcased several examples of electronic procurement tools. One of these, the German XVergabe suite of procurement tools developed by the Procurement Agency of the German Federal Ministry of Interior, will gradually be made available as open source, IT project leader Marc Christopher Schmidt said. "We want to offer enterprises the freedom to choose."
Scott Bell, head of Scotland's department for Procurement Policy and Systems, explained that their system was designed to be platform-independent. "It should work in any web browser."
In a press statement published in April, the EC states that only 5 to 10 per cent of procurement is done electronically. Yet, e-Procurement helps public entities save between 5 and 20 per cent of their procurement expenditure. "The total size of the EU's procurement market is estimated to be more than 2 trillion euro, so each 5 per cent saved could result in about 100 billion euro of savings per year."
Barnier, on Tuesday: "e-Procurement should become the rule, not the exception. That's why the European Parliament and the Council are considering a reform bill that should make e-Procurement the standard, throughout the EU, by mid-2016."
More information:
Speech by European Commissioner Michel Barnier (in French)
1st Annual Conference on Electronic Procurement
EC press release on e-Procurement