The PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specification, “BIS” from here on after, has been developed by the OpenPEPPOL AISBL Pre Award Coordinating Community and is published as part of the PEPPOL specifications.

Statement of copyright

This PEPPOL Business Interoperability Specification (BIS) document is based on the CEN CWA prepared by the BII workshop specified in the introduction below. The original CEN CWA document contains the following copyright notice which still applies:

© 2012 CEN All rights of exploitation in any form and by any means reserved worldwide for CEN national Members.

The CEN CWA documents and profiles prepared by the BII workshop are not specific to a business area. Subject to agreement with CEN, customizations have been made by PEPPOL to establish the PEPPOL BIS, detailing and adding further guidance on the use of BII profiles.

OpenPEPPOL AISBL holds the copyright in the customizations made to the original document. The customizations appear from the corresponding conformance statement which is attached to this document. For the purpose of national implementations, customizations covered by the conformance statement may be further refined and detailed by PEPPOL Authorities and/or other entities authorized by OpenPEPPOL AISBL, provided that interoperability with PEPPOL BIS is ensured. This PEPPOL BIS document may not be modified, re-distributed, sold or repackaged in any other way without the prior consent of CEN and/or OpenPEPPOL AISBL.

Introduction to openPEPPOL and BIS

This Peppol BIS provides a set of specifications for implementing a Peppol business process. The document is concerned with clarifying requirements for ensuring interoperability of pan-European Public eProcurement and provides guidelines for the support and implementation of these requirements. This document is based on work done by the e-SENS pilot project as well as work done by CEN WS/BII 3.

BII relationship
Figure 1. Relationship between BII profiles and PEPPOL BIS

The Profile P003 - "Tender Submission" 1.2 describes electronic messaging support for the business process of an economic operator submitting electronic tender to a contracting body, as a response to a call for tender. The contracting body notifies the economic operator of having received the tender.

The purpose of this document is to facilitate an efficient implementation and increased use of electronic collaboration regarding the tendering process based on these formats.

Audience

The audience for this document is organizations wishing to be PEPPOL enabled for exchanging electronic pre-award catalogues, and/or their ICT-suppliers. These organizations may be:

  • Service providers

  • Contracting Authorities (CA)

  • Economic Operators (EO)

  • Software Developers

More specifically, roles addressed are the following:

  • ICT Architects

  • ICT Developers

  • Business Experts

For further information on PEPPOL/OpenPEPPOL, please see Peppol

1. Principles and prerequisites

This chapter describes the principles and assumptions that underlie the use of Peppol Pre-award. It is based on the CEN BII and the work done by e-SENS eTendering:

The CEN WS/BII 3 profile document is available from your national standardization body.

The intended scope for this profile includes public procurement, but the profile may also be used in Business to Business (B2B) relations.

This profile is intended to support transmission of electronic documents for processing in (semi-)automated processes. The legal requirements that were taken into account are requirements from European legislation, in particular the Directive 2014/23/EU, Directive 2014/24/EU and Directive 2014/25/EU

1.1. Associated notification and tendering procedures

This section provides a brief overview about the notification and tendering procedures and their associated Peppol BIS and transactions. The illustration thereby points to the relevant Peppol BISs that depict a particular business process. Additionally, the guideline references the underlying CEN WS/BII 3 Workshop Agreement. The CEN BII3 workshop is a standardisation initiative within CEN (European Committee for Standardisation). It provides a framework for interoperability in pan-European electronic transactions expressed as a set of technical specifications ("Profiles") .

The profiles provided by CEN BII3 and Peppol are designed to facilitate effective public e-procurement based on a modular approach for implementation, with a focus on global interoperability. Thereby, BII profiles can be seen as “agreements” on message contents and business processes and are the baseline for many Peppol BISs which add specific technical implementation perspectives that are further illustrated in section 6. Thus, the CEN profile descriptions rather focus on the core information elements that typically cater to the majority of user requirements applicable across Europe and lower the need for detailed bilateral agreements between the trading partners whereas Peppol provides a framework for their implementation and adaption.

1.1.1. Notification procedures

Official notification through publishing bodies is part of many procurement procedures. 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 a procedure, a contract award notice about the result of the procedure is published.

eNotification covers the transfer of electronic 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. eNotification is therefore generally addressed to eTendering Plattform Providers, Contracting Bodies, publishers, print shops, information brokers or monitoring or statistical services. 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 model of procurement notices in Europe is based on Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2019/1780 and upon Directive 2014/23/EU, Directive 2014/24/EU and Directive 2014/25/EU and their annexes, particularly the annex describing the standard forms to be used for the publication of procurement notices. eForms are at the core of the digital transformation of public procurement in the EU. Through the use of a common standard and terminology, they can significantly improve the quality and analysis of data. Well-implemented eForms increase the ability of businesses and other organisations to find opportunities. They will also reduce the administrative burden for buyers, increase the ability of governments to make data-driven decisions about public spending, and make public procurement more transparent.

eNotification covers the electronic transfer of electronic notices for publication and dissemination services. The publication of notices is executed between a contracting body or his representative and a publisher. CEN WS/BII 3 profiles BII14 Prior Information Notice (CWA 17026-102), BII10 Contract Notice (CWA 17026-101) and BII43 Contract Award Notice (CWA 17026-103) describe the exchange of notices between a contracting body or his representative and a publisher. In Peppol, these profiles are covered by the Peppol BIS P008 Publish Notice which provides electronic messaging support to publish a prior information notice, a contract notice or a contract award notice. Thus, Peppol BIS P008 Publish Notice helps contracting bodies to announce business opportunities and contract awards in public procurement procedures.

In the EU, eForms are used to publish notices above threshold on Tenders Electronic Daily (TED)—an online portal for public procurement notices from across the EU. On the national level public procurement decision makers can benefit from eForms through tailoring and defining a national approach to the various aspects of eForms, e.g. using them for contracts below thresholds, considering different policies and requirements.

The Peppol BIS P006 Search Notice supports a process by which a notification platform can be queried along a set of parameters to find relevant notices and related metadata required by other PEPPOL BISs. The profile is based on CEN WS/BII 3 Profile BII45 Search Notice (CWA 17026-104:2016). The transactions, specified in BIS P006 Search Notice are intended to be exchanged between eTendering systems and Publication Bodies but they can be adopted by many other actors. Since the P006 Search Notice provides access to Open Data, it also provides possibilities for the establishment of new business models that allow monitoring, the provision of statistical information or easy access for economic operators to business opportunities in different countries across different eTendering and eNotification platforms.

In order to execute the Peppol BIS P008 Publish Notice and Peppol BIS P006 Search Notice, it is necessary that the parties have Peppol eDelivery in place to enable them to send and receive the transactions in a secure way. Implementers must also support eForms content model because the transactions are based on the EU-wide eForms standard.

1.1.2. Tendering procedures

For the purpose of initiating electronic tendering via Peppol, the Peppol BIS P006 Search Notice plays a significant role. When the contracting body has published a notice, the interested economic operators who finds it may want to subscribe to this procedure by using PEPPOL P001 Procurement procedure subscription based on BII46 Subscribe to Procedure. Thereby, the Profile P006 Search Notice delivers necessary organisational and technical information to identify the procedure and contracting authority. This information is required because the request for procurement procedure subscription must be directed to the entity responsible for the procurement procedure.

eTendering can be put in place using different procedures, depending on the value and the type of the contract to be awarded, on the legal nature of the contracting body and on specific member state national legislation (Directive 2014/24/EU art. 26). Article 26 to 32 from Directive 2014/24/EU and article 43 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 CEN WS/BII 3 BII37 Open Procedure (CWA 17027-106) and CEN WS/BII 3 BII39 Restricted Procedure (CWA 17027-108).

In open procedures, any economic operator can access the tender documents (including the call for tenders) and submit a tender before the time expires, without any previous assessment of their capabilities. In restricted and negotiated procedures and in a competitive dialogue the interested economic operators must submit a request to participate in order to be invited in the tendering process by the contracting body. When the contracting body has published a notice, the interested economic operators may subscribe (unscubsribe) to obtain (not obtain) tendering information using profile CEN WS/BII 3 BII46 Subscribe to Procedure (CWA 17027-111) covered by Peppol BIS P001 Procurement procedure subscription. Restricted and negotiated procedures require sending the invitation to tender (profile CEN WS/BII 3 BII52 Invitation to Tender (CWA 17027-117) to the identified candidates.

Once the interested economic operator has subscribed to an open procedure, the contracting authority provides the procurement documents by using Peppol BIS P002 Procurement document access. The BIS P002 is based on CEN WS/BII 3 BII60 Tender Status Inquiry (CWA 17027-123) and CEN WS/BII 3 BII47 Call for Tenders (CWA 17027-112) and provides the call for tender documents. It can be repeated at any time until the tender submission deadline to receive the latest version of the procurement documents. Additionally, contracting authorities must push updates to the economic operators that subscribed to a procedure.

Within the call for tenders, contracting authorities must inform economic operators how to qualify for the procedure. This may be done by an European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) defined by the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/7 for which Peppol develops the BIS ESPD 3.0 based on the ESPD Exchange Data Model version 3.0. Additionally, call for tenders may include pre-award catalogue information to describe products and services in a common format allowing economic operators to send offers in a structured way and contracting authorities to evaluate products and services automatically through their tendering tools. The Peppol BIS pre-award catalogue can be used for this purpose and was defined according to the CEN WS/BII 3 Profile BII35 Advanced Tendering with Pre-award Catalogue.

Restricted and negotiated procedures require a previous qualification using profile CEN WS/BII 3 BII 49 Qualification (CWA 17027-114) covered by PEPPOL BIS P011 Qualification before submitting a tender. In restricted and negotiated procedures the contracting authority will send an invitation to tender using profile CEN WS/BII 3 BII52 Invitation to Tender (CWA 17027-117) to the identified candidates which have been selected to submit a tender. In contrast, those economic operators whose qualifications are being rejected are informed using profile CEN WS/BII 3 BII 51 Qualification Rejection (CWA 17027-116).

Once the economic operator has received the call for tenders or invitation to tender, it can use the Peppol BIS P004 Call for Tenders Questions and Answers for the business process of answering questions about a call for tenders. The BIS P004 is based upon CEN WS/BII3 profile BII48 Call for Tenders Questions and Answers (CWA 17027-113) and supports economic operators asking questions about call for tenders. Answers of the contracting authority then have to be sent to all economic operators that subscribed to the procedure and additionally the call for tenders should be updated and pushed to the subscribers of the procedure.

In case the economic operator decides to submit a tender, he can use the Peppol BIS P003 Tender Submission. After the submission of a tender, the contracting body notifies the economic operator of having received the tender. The BIS P003 is based upon CEN WS/BII3 profile BII54 Tendering (CWA 17027-119). On the contrary, economic operators can decide to withdraw a tender that was previously submitted by using the Peppol BIS P007 Tender Withdrawal. The BIS P007 was derived from CEN WS/BII3 profile BII53 Tender Withdrawal (CWA 17027-118) and provides electronic messaging support for the economic operator to withdraw a tender. The contracting body notifies the economic operator of having received the tender withdrawal. After the tender withdrawal, an economic operator may submit a new offer at any time before the tender submission deadline.

On the opening date, the contracting authority gathers and opens all received tenders. The opening board members can now evaluate the received tenders. If questions about specific offers arise during the course of the evaluation, they can be answered through the Peppol BIS P005 Tender Clarification. The BIS P005 supports the contracting authority to clarify questions on a tender which has been submitted. The BIS P005 was defined according to the requirements gathered by the CEN WS/BII3 profile BII50 Tender Clarification (CWA 17027-115).

At the end of the evaluation process, the contracting authority needs to inform the participating economic operators upon the results of the tender evaluation. For this purpose, contracting authorities can use the Peppol BIS P009 Notify Awarding which provides electronic messaging support to inform the bidders that a contract has been awarded to a particular economic operator. The BIS P009 is based upon the CEN WS/BII3 profile BII58 Notify Awarding (CWA 17027-121). The contracting authority can use BIS P009 to inform the winner(s) at the same time as they inform the unsuccessful tenderers and they must individually declare the reasons why they failed. The notification of the awarding decision imitated by BIS P009 shall also start the standstill period clock. After the stand still period, the contracting authority can finalize the contract with the winning supplier and also send a contract award notice using BIS Peppol BIS P008 Publish Notice.

1.2. Parties and roles

The following parties participate as business partners in this transaction, acting in the roles as defined below

Table 1. parties
Party Description Example of roles

Customer

The customer is the legal person or organization who is in demand of a product, service or works.

Buyer, consignee, debtor, contracting body

Supplier

The supplier is the legal person or organization who provides a product, service or works.

Seller, consignor, creditor, economic operator

Table 2. roles
Role Description

Contracting body

The contracting authority or contracting entity who is buying supplies, services or tendering works.

Economic operator

Party participating with a bid in a procurement process to sell goods, services or works.

parties roles

1.3. Non-functional requirements

For the Peppol BIS all Peppol non-functional requirements are applicable as documented in CEN WS/BII 3 "Profile BII54 Tendering" (CWA 17027-119) and "Profile BII35 Advanced Tendering with Pre-award Catalogue"(CWA 17027-105). Implementers must comply to these requirements.

Req. ID Requirement statement

br54-001

All tenders shall be linked to a procurement project in order for the contracting body to be able to evaluate.

br54-002

If imposed by the contracting body the economic operator shall sign his tender before submission with the required signature level.

br54-004

All tenders shall be encrypted upon submission. Encryption keys are provided by the contracting body.

br54-006

The receipt notification of a tender shall contain a cryptographic time stamp of the moment the Contracting body or his service provider received the complete tender.

br54-007

The economic operator shall receive an acknowledgement (REM Evidence) that his tender has been received by the contracting body for the purpose of a non-repudiation of receipt.

br54-010

Tenders shall NOT be accessible before the time limit set out in the call for tenders has passed.

br54-011

The contracting body should use a legally accepted e-Signature validation services.

br54-012

The contracting body should be able to send the results of the tender evaluation to all economic operators who submitted a tender.

br54-016

Encrypted tenders should be wrapped in an unencrypted envelope.

br54-017

The contracting authority may allow or require that the tender/lot contain variants. Article 45 of the Articles 2014/24/EC and Article .64 of the Directive 2014/25.

br54-018

Integrity of the message is ensured through the signature by the eTendering Service Provider who signs the ASIC Manifest.

br54-019

eTendering Service Providers use PEPPOL certificates for signing the tender.

1.4. Tender Encryption

The Call For Tenders (CfT) business document is used by the contracting authority to provide an economic operator with the latest updated procurement documents. Besides transporting procurement documents it MUST be used to transport the encryption certificate needed by the economic operator to encrypt his tender for submission. The method how to include the Encryption Certificates is desribed in T004 - section 5.5. Transport of encryption certificate via the Call For Tenders

If the CfT business document provided an encryption certificate, the tender documents MUST be encrypted by the economic operator using that certificate.

The example provided in T005 - section 5.2.3 Attached documents and tender encryption illustrates an attached and encrypted tender document, its hash and algorithm. Encrypted tender documents must use the file extension .p7m in <cbc:Filename></cbc:Filename>. The attached tender document in the provided example is an unstructured .pdf file.

1.5. Interoperability

It applies the Framework as follows:

  1. Legal Interoperability

  2. Organizational interoperability

    • Organization (Organization/Business):

    • Organization (Process):

      • PEPPOL eTendering BIS support a set of “common business processes” that are assumed to be supported by most enterprises whether public or private. These are processes that are used widely or understood as being relevant for most companies.

      • The current scope of the PEPPOL eTendering BIS and guidelines include processes that support the main flow of open procedures such publication of notices, search of notices, calls for tenders, tenders and awarding notifications. During these processes additional support processes may be executed between contracting bodies and economic operators, such as procurement procedure subscription, call for tenders’ questions and answers, tender withdrawal or tender clarifications.

      • The BIS Pre-Award Guide for Notification and Open Procedure describes the choreography to execute open procedures using Peppol. Thus, the Notification & Open Procedure Guideline is a procedural specification. The guideline does not define individual transactions but it refers to Peppol several BISs and underlying standards, in which the transactions and the transaction information requirements are listed and defined. Even though the guideline is based on a set of PEPPOL BISs, its contents are derived from the agreement BII37 Open Procedure of the CEN Workshop on Business Interoperability Interfaces for Public Procurement in Europe .

  3. Technical interoperability

2. Business process

The BPMN diagram shows the choreography of the business process implemented by the Profile P003 - "Tender Submission" 1.2. The choreography of business collaborations defines the sequence of interactions when the profile is run within its context.

bpmn003
Table 3. Business process
Category Description

Description

An economic operator prepares and then submits a tender to a contracting body, as a response to a call for tender. The tender is to be encrypted according to defined business needs, as specified in thhe Call for Tender. The process of encryption and decryption has to be considered as conformant to the profile.

The Tender must contain documents as defined by the procedure, e.g. an ESPD, Pre-award catalogue and other structured and unstructured document that the contracting authority requires in the Tender. The contracting body notifies the economic operator of having received the Tender.

The contracting body notifies the economic operator of having received the Tender.

Pre-conditions

A contracting body has issued a call for tender to potential applicants.

Post-conditions

Tenders have been received by the contracting body and are to be evaluated by him. Tender reception has been notified to the economic operators.

Table 4. Role description
Activity Role involved Description

Send Tender

Economic operator

The economic operator has prepared his offer and submits the signed and encrypted tender documents.

Receive Tender

Contracting body

The contracting body receives the bid, but doesn’t look at the content of the bid before the deadline for submission has passed. The bid is kept secure in a tender box.

Confirm tender reception

Contracting body

The contracting body sends the economic operator an acknowledgement with time stamp of reception and hash code of the bid.

Receive tender receipt notification

Economic operator

The economic operator receives the electronic tender reception notification document

3. Implementation guidelines

Profile P003 - "Tender Submission" 1.2 is based on work done by CEN WS/BII 3, and business rules and code lists used are inherited from the following CEN WS/BII 3 and UBL 2.2 documents:

urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:Tender-2 urn:oasis:names:specification:ubl:schema:xsd:TenderReceipt-2

The syntax mapping for Profile P003 - "Tender Submission" 1.2 has been tested and revised during the e-SENS pilot and is based on transaction description for Submit Tender (Trdm090) and Tender Reception Notification (Trdm045) done by CEN WS/BII 3. Requirements, business rules and code lists used are inherited from the following documents:

Peppol Profile P003 - "Tender Submission" 1.2 business process includes 2 transactions:

4. PEPPOL identifiers

PEPPOL has defined a Policy for Using Identifiers that specifies how to use identifiers in both its transport infrastructure and within the documents exchanged across that infrastructure. It also introduces principles for any identifiers used in the PEPPOL environment.

4.1. Profile identification

All transactions within this profile uses the following profile identifier

The value of the Element cbc:ProfileID for all transactions of this profile must be urn:fdc:peppol.eu:prac:bis:p003:1.2

4.2. Specification identification

In the table below you will find the values to be used as the specification identifier (Element cbc:CustomizationID) for the different transactions of this profile.

Table 5. Specification identifiers for the transactions
TransactionID Transaction name Short Description Element cbc:CustomizationID

T005

Tender

EO sends his tender for the procurement project to CA

urn:fdc:peppol.eu:prac:trns:t005:1.2

T006

TenderReceipt

CA sends tender reception acknowledgement to EO

urn:fdc:peppol.eu:prac:trns:t006:1.2

For implementers, please note that the process identifiers in the document instance MUST correspond to the SMP process identifier.

5. Revision history

Version Date Author Organization Description

0.1

15-03-2016

Siw Midtgård Meckelborg

DIFI/Edisys

First draft for review

0.9

30-08-2016

Siw Midtgård Meckelborg

DIFI/Edisys

Corrected after review

1.0

22-12-2016

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Changes in section Business Rules (updated tables for business and syntax rules for Trdm090 and schematron files)

1.1

05-01-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated schematron file names in section “Technical interoperability”.
Changes in section Business Rules (updated tables for business and syntax rules for Trdm045 and schematron files)

1.2

11-01-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated schematron files, business and syntax rules for transactions Trdm090 and Trdm045 (based on 2017-01-09 schematron files)

1.3

13-01-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated schematron files for transaction Trdm090 (based on 2017-01-13 schematron files)

1.4

26-01-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated schematron files, business rules for transactions Trdm090 and Trdm045 (based on 2017-01-20 schematron files)

1.5

31-01-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated column "Remarks" in table "Business Rules" for Trdm045.

1.6

07-02-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Updated technical interoperability section, schematron files, business and syntax rules for Trdm090 and Trdm045 and examples (based on 2017-02-06 schematron files).

1.7

16-02-2017

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOο

Transaction business and information requirements for Trdm090 and Trdm045

1.8

23-04-2021

Ansgar Mondorf

UKL

Editorial changes related to links and references.

1.1

01-03-2023

Ansgar Mondorf

Mondorf IT

Final editorial review for March Release 2023: Update Version information, links & examples, editorial improvements, change of transaction structure

6. Contributors

Country Name Organization

NO

Siw Midtgård Meckelborg

DIFI/Edisys

NO

Jan Mærøe

DIFI

NO

Morten Hartlev Lindhart

Mercell Norge AS

FI

Lasse Riekkinen

Cloudia Oy

NL

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOo

NL

Erik Holkers

PIANOo

GR

Jerry Dimitriou

University of Piraeus

GR

Andriana Prentza

University of Piraeus

NL

Kornelis Drijfhout

PIANOo

NL

Chander Khoenkhoen

PIANOo

DK

Finn Bock

Inno:vasion

DE

Ansgar Mondorf

Mondorf IT / University of Koblenz-Landau