eDelivery – a success story of European reuse
According to available monitoring data, by the end of Q1 2021 eDelivery was being used by 39 multi-country projects, with another 25 being in the process of implementing it. These projects led to the implementation of hundreds of Access Points and to exchange of millions of messages everyday thanks to eDelivery technology. Furthermore, an expansion of the use of the building block across several eGovernment sectors was observed. Many believe that eDelivery was one of the most successful reuse initiatives to have ever been carried out in European public administration, and the monitoring of the adoption of the building block confirms this assumption.
eDelivery has been used in a wide range of sectors across many domains. For example, the Import Control System 2 (ICS 2), a critical EU-system supporting implementation of customs safety and security regulatory regime, uses eDelivery to provide economic operators with a single harmonised trader interface with the customs authorities. ISC 2 uses TAPAS, an eDelivery Access Point for AS4, through which all the data about the goods entering the EU is received.
In the area of company law, the Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS) and the Beneficial Ownership Registers Interconnection System (BORIS) connect the EU Member States’ national registers to each other and with the European Commission Central Platform using eDelivery Access Points.
In the area of eProcurement, OpenPeppol relies on eDelivery to enable European businesses to easily deal electronically with any European public sector buyers in their procurement processes, thereby increasing opportunities for greater competition for government contracts and providing better value for taxpayers’ money.
In the justice domain, a number of projects rely on e-CODEX – a European digital infrastructure for secure cross-border communication in the field of justice, which uses eDelivery for secure information exchange. For example, eEvidence Digital Exchange System (eEDES) relies on e-CODEX for the standardised encoding, transmission and follow-up of the European Investigation Order forms. e-CODEX and eDelivery are also at the core of implementing the Commission’s policy of “Digitalisation of cross-border judicial cooperation”. eDelivery is mentioned as a key component in the cross-border electronic exchange of data in the area of judicial cooperation in civil and criminal matters in the recent Regulation (EU) 2022/850.
eDelivery plays a key role in the eGovernance of the Inland Waterways Transport (IWT) sector, contributing to the implementation of a Single Digital Gateway and Once-Only Principle in everything that regards data on IWT crew (the European Crew Database Project). In the project on the European Maritime Single Window environment (EMSWe), the European Commission selected eDelivery (and Domibus) as one of the protocols to be used by the harmonised reporting interface module (RIM), which means all maritime Member States will support eDelivery once they start operating the RIM.
Starting in September 2022, eDelivery will also be piloted as the interoperable messaging protocol in enabling the European Health Data Space (EHDS). Finally, in the area of taxation management eDelivery has been selected as a tool to facilitate data transfer from Member States to the Central Electronic System of Payment information (CESOP). The objective of the CESOP is to give tax authorities of the Member States the right instruments to detect possible e-commerce VAT fraud carried out by sellers established in another Member State or in a non-EU country. The transmission of data must start in January 2024.
While most of the above projects use eDelivery Access Points in a static configuration approach where all participants are preconfigured, an increased interest in the eDelivery SML service is also observed in implementations where dynamic discovery of participants is at play. In 2021, four domains joined the eDelivery SML service, while two more requested additional subdomains in 2022 to further diversify their projects.
For more information regarding eDelivery and the eDelivery SML service, please contact us via our portal or by e-mail: EC-EDELIVERY-SUPPORT@ec.europa.eu.
The eDelivery Building Block
eDelivery is a building block that provides technical specifications and standards, installable software and ancillary services to allow projects to create a network of nodes for secure digital data exchange.
The eDelivery SML Service operates an instance of the SML software to enable dynamic discovery of participants in message exchange networks. It is open to domains interested to use SML as a service.
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