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Scotland aims to eliminate millions of paper invoices with eInvoicing
Sophia Bunemann posted on Oct 04, 2018

CEF TELECOM GRANT BENEFICIARY

Scotland aims to eliminate millions of paper invoices with eInvoicing

 

Like many governments, the Scottish Government was searching for a solution to reduce the burden of processing millions of paper invoices.

The government started searching for a suitable solution in 2009 but the immaturity of the offerings at relatively high costs prevented the government from pursuing eInvoicing.

The Scottish solution 

As time passed, technology and with it eInvoicing solutions evolved, and the introduction of The EU eInvoicing Directive provided impetus to pursue the implementation of eInvoicing. After a project pilot in 2012, the government developed an eInvoicing shared service model via PECOS (the national Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) solution) using “intelligent PDF” capability. Given that PECOS already supported the transmission of over 2.5 million orders per annum, the implementation of eInvoicing was a natural next step and closed the electronic procurement circle. 

The developed solution does not require public sector entities or suppliers to make any major technological changes to their systems or internal processes. For suppliers, all that is required is the ability to automatically generate a machine-readable PDF invoice which most billing systems can, making it very user-friendly and simple to implement.  The Scottish shared service model is available to all public sector entities across Scotland and is compliant with both OpenPEPPOL and the Directive. 

eInvoicing in Scotland today  

To date, seventeen public sector entities use the solution, processing over 25,000 eInvoices monthly from 70 suppliers. The number of processed eInvoices is increasing monthly and the government is currently engaging with 68 additional public sector entities to implement the eInvoicing solution. Additionally, the government is currently onboarding a further 94 suppliers to the solution to spread eInvoicing further.

The government will continue to promote the eInvoicing Directive to encourage stakeholders to be compliant by 19 April 2019. And it recently presented its implementation success at a CEF eInvoicing webinar.

Get in touch 

This project was funded by the CEF Telecom grant "eInvoice Expansion (2015-UK-IA-0056)". Read more to learn how you can apply for EU funding for your project. 

Interested to learn more about eInvoicing in Scotland? Contact the team einvoice@gov.scot

Or are you interested in attending the next eInvoice webinar? Connect with the eInvoicing User Community and learn about upcoming events.

Are you ready for eInvoicing?

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CEF eInvoicing




CEF Context Broker: FIWARE-NGSI v2 Specification Launched
Thomas FILLIS posted on Oct 03, 2018

CEF Context Broker: FIWARE-NGSI v2 Specification Launched

©pixabay

FIWARE has launched FIWARE-NGSI version 2 API.

FIWARE-NGSI v2 is intended to manage the entire lifecycle of context information, including updates, queries, registrations, and subscriptions.

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Context Broker Building Block enables organisations (including but not limited to public administrations) to manage and share data in real-time describing, “what is currently happening” within their organisations, in the real world they manage or where they run their daily business processes. Thus, for example, Smart Cities can share information about what is happening in streets (e.g., traffic status, quality of air data, available parking slots or location).  This information describing what is currently happening is referred as “context information”.

The CEF Context Broker provides the FIWARE NGSI API, which is a RESTful API enabling applications to provide updates and get access to context information.

The FIWARE Community is an independent Open Community whose members are committed to materialise the FIWARE mission, which is “to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors”

CEF supports multiple digital infrastructure projects, which contribute to improvements in the daily lives of Europeans through digital inclusion, the connectivity and interoperability of European digital services, and the development of a Digital Single Market.

Consultation on 2019 CEF eDelivery Roadmaps
Thomas FILLIS posted on Oct 03, 2018

Consultation on 2019 CEF eDelivery Roadmaps


The European Commission is happy to announce that the detailed 2019 Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery roadmaps are open for consultation and comments. The consultation closes on 18 October 2018.

CEF eDelivery is based on a distributed model called the “4-corner model”. In this model, the back-end systems of the users don’t exchange data directly with each other but do this through Access Points. These Access Points are conformant to the same technical specifications and therefore capable of communicating with each other. As a result of this, users adopting CEF eDelivery can easily and safely exchange data even if their IT systems were developed independently from each other.

CEF eDelivery provides a sample Access Point implementation called Domibus.

Please find below the respective roadmaps for Domibus and Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) and Service Metadata Locator (SML).

Comments can be submitted on the consultation page by 18 October 2018.

eDelivery to connect national railway application procedures
Sophia Bunemann posted on Oct 02, 2018

eDelivery to connect national railways application procedures

How to effectively communicate and process railway certificate and project applications to the Member States is a challenge for the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA) and calls for innovative solutions.

ERA and the CEF eDelivery team held a webinar to present the user of eDelivery within the One-Stop Shop project to the member states that will use the One-Stop Shop to communicate with ERA.  

To date, National railways handle independent application processes for these ERA applications. Files are submitted predominantly in paper format by post, while a small margin of operators operate a document management system to support the national railway authority’s tasks. In addition, it becomes a tedious task for the ERA to keep up-to-date on all applications and to effectively communicate the stage of each application.

The virtual One-Stop Shop has been developed to solve this issue.  The One-Stop Shop is the single entry point through which all applications files will be submitted in the future. The platform aims to connect member states national railway authorities to deliver documents securely through a single-entry point.

This autumn Sweden will start a pilot test-run and ERA plans to rollout the One-Stop Shop across the EU by June 2019.

Get to know

In addition, the European Commission is organising a live hands-on-webinar to practice sending your first AS4 message on October 9th, 2018.

The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) supports multiple digital infrastructure projects which contribute to improvements in the daily lives of Europeans through digital inclusion, the connectivity and interoperability of European digital services, and the development of a Digital Single Market.