CWA 16560:2013

Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public procurement in Europe - Use of profiles in the tendering process CWA 16560:2013

Scope

This CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) is a deliverable of the second CEN Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for public procurement in Europe (WS/BII2).
The objective of the BII initiative is to provide a framework for interoperability in pan-European electronic procurement transactions, expressed as a set of requirements and technical specifications. The requirements are input into UN/CEFACT in order to ensure global interoperability.
The original CEN Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for public procurement in Europe (WS/BII) was concluded in December 2009, and its results, including a set of profiles, were issued as CWA 16073:2010.
Based on user input WS/BII2 has issued a number of new profiles and reviewed and updated a number of the profiles published as part of CWA 16073:2010.
WS/BII2 profiles
A WS/BII2 profile description is a technical specification describing
- the scope of a business process with its goals, preconditions and the roles of participating parties,
- the choreography of the business process covered, i.e. a detailed description of the way the business partners collaborate to play their respective roles and share responsibilities to achieve mutually agreed goals with the support of their respective information systems,
- the electronic business transactions exchanged as part of the business process, with their information requirements, and the sequence in which these transactions are exchanged,
- the business rules governing the execution of that business process, as well as any constraints on information elements used in the information requirement models of the transactions.
The profiles focus on the standardization on the organisational and semantics interoperability levels rather than on syntax or technical interoperability levels. Consequently the business transactions within a profile can be structured based on different message standards/syntaxes as long these can carry all the necessary information elements.
Although the profile descriptions and information requirement models provided by WS/BII2 are neutral of syntax, the workshop also published specifications of how the models may be mapped to defined syntaxes. This is done in order provide implementable specifications.
The main focus of the profile description and the associated information requirement models is to address generally expressed business requirements, applicable throughout the European market. Although the profile description is designed to meet generally expressed requirements, it is still the responsibility of the users to ensure that the exchanges within the actual business transactions meet all the legal, fiscal and commercial requirements relevant to their business.
WS/BII2 Pre-award support
The BII workshop has developed a set of profiles to support interoperability in the pre- and post-award areas. The scope of BII2 is public procurement but the profiles apply as well to private trade since many private customers use tendering as good business practice. In those cases official Notification of calls and contracts is often not applicable.
The scope of BII2 pre-award profiles include processes that support communication of qualifications, calls for tender with and without catalogue templates, tenders with and without catalogues and contract notices. During these processes additional information need to be exchanged between contracting authorities and economic operators, such as questions and answers and documents supporting a final guarantee. These sub processes are currently out of scope for the workshop.