CWA 17026-1:2016

Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public Procurement in Europe - E-Notification - Part 1: E-Notification overview Business Interoperability Interfaces for public procurement in Europe - E-Notification overview CWA 17026-1:2016

Scope

The BII workshop has developed a set of profiles to support interoperability in the pre- and post-award areas. The scope of BII is public procurement but the profiles apply as well to private trade since many private customers use tendering as good business practice. In such cases official notification of calls for tender and contracts is often not applicable.
The scope of BII pre-award profiles include processes that support communication of notices on the procedures; calls for tenders with and without catalogue requests; tenders with and without catalogues and qualifications. During these processes additional information need to be exchanged between contracting bodies and economic operators, such as questions and answers and documents supporting a virtual company dossier.

1.1.1 eNotification in General
Many pre-award opportunities first become visible to the economic operators in the form of notices describing upcoming or current procurement procedures (prior information notices or contract notices). At the end of such procedures a notice is published (contract award notice) notifying the result of the procedure.
eNotification covers the electronic transfer of electronic public procurement notices for publication and dissemination with the ultimate aim of opening business opportunities. eNotification profiles are addressed to all those who exchange procurement notices for publication and further information processing. The profiles are therefore generally addressed to contracting bodies, publishers, print shops, information brokers, monitoring or statistical services, as well as, in the case of contract award notices, the general public. eNotification can be carried out at various levels and between different levels (regional, state, European, etc.). The legal obligation of publishing notices at the correct level is the responsibility of the contracting bodies.
The content of the notices described in the BII eNotification profiles are essentially based on Directive 2014/23/EU, Directive 2014/24/EU and Directive 2014/25/EU and their annexes. The profiles can however be applied to notices with other legal obligations, if the information requirements fit to their needs.
Profiles BII14 Prior Information Notice, BII10 Contract Notice and BII43 Contract Award Notice describe the communication between a contracting body or his representative and a publisher. Profile BII61 describes communication between publishers. The process by which notices can be searched for on a given platform are described in profiles BII62 Exchange of Notice Metadata and BII45 Search Notices. These profiles are included in CWA 17026.
When the contracting body has published a notice, the interested economic operators may subscribe to obtain tendering information using profile BII46 Subscribe to Procedure. The tendering information is also publicly available on the platform used by the contracting body. Negotiated procedures require sending the invitation to tender (profile BII52, BII38 or BII40) to identified candidates. Article 26 to 32 from Directive 2014/24/EU and article 44 to 50 from Directive 2014/25/EU describe the different tendering procedures that can be used by contracting bodies. For the purpose of electronic tendering, some of these procedures have been described in BII profiles BII37 (open procedure) and BII39 (restricted procedure). These profiles are included in CWA 17027.
eNotification in the broad sense of the word is currently split into three areas: Notifying, Searching and Publishing.
1.1.2 Notifying
In this area profiles have been developed describing how contracting bodies or their representatives can send notices to a publication body for publication. Three types of profile have been described in this area:
- BII14 Prior information notice
- BII10 Contract notice
- BII43 Contract award notice
This area is covered by the eNotification business process (see section 1.4.1)