Case Study: Peppol

PEPPOL is the culmination of a multi-year project co-funded by the European Commission and 11 Member States. It aims to harmonise and simplify procurement processes, reducing ‘digital’ barriers of trade across the EU.

OpenPEPPOL is a not for profit organisation funded by its members. It maintains a set of standards that enable businessdocuments (such as purchase ordersand invoices) to be electronically exchanged without manual intervention between buying and selling organisations throughinteroperablecommercial PEPPOL access points.

The PEPPOL 4-corner model allows each NHS buyer and supplier to select their own preferred access point provider for messaging all participants in the network (with no fees payable between access points) ensuringthat the process remains open, transparent and secure.

The core underlying principle of the 4-corner model is that a supplier or buyer should connect once totrade with any EU public sector buyer or supplier in the network. PEPPOL Access Point providers offer a range of service packages to facilitate the connection to the PEPPOL network. These services are tailored to the maturity of the organisation, ranging from low cost ‘portals’ for SMEs to advanced integration services for multinationals.This enables both buyers and sellers, particularly SMEs, to choose an appropriate solution based on their own requirements and resources.

PEPPOL Demonstration of Technology

In April and May of 2015, an exercise was commissioned to Celeris to demonstrate the PEPPOL technology and processes within the NHS acute setting. The following NHStrusts, suppliers, access points, and European test partnerstook part:

“The demonstration was an overwhelming success”, said Nigel Ransom, who oversaw the project for Data Interchange.

Because PEPPOL is already a mature production environment in other European countries, many of the participating service providers already had experience with live data exchanges between buyers and sellers.

“Our experience with PEPPOL in Norway has shown that it makes interoperability with other service providers throughout Europe much easier”, said Christian Druschke of IBX-Capgemini. “This project paves the way for the Department of Health to streamline eProcurement in the NHS using proven standards”.

In addition, Carmen Ciciriello and the Celeris team were responsible for all the activities of the PEPPOL Authority in the UK.