eDelivery in practice: EU4Digital virtual study visit highlights solutions and opportunities

The EU4Digital Facility on 9 October held a virtual study visit on eDelivery. The goal of the event was for participants to get acquainted with eDelivery, to understand its goals, value and benefits, as well as to get a better understanding of how it works in practice. 

The event – held in the framework of the annual Steering Committee Meeting of the EU4Digital Initiative – gathered more than 45 participants from the six Eastern partner countries, working in both public and private institutions, including officials working in in the area of cross-border eTrade, participants and observers in the EU4Digital eDelivery pilot, as well as other interested parties.

During the event, participants had an opportunity to hear about eDelivery straight from the professionals in the field, and to make virtual visits to different countries and organisations from all over the Europe, including  CEF Digital,  e-CODEX,  OpenPeppol, and the Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management. 

The visit began with an introduction to eDelivery by Inês Da Costa, the Stakeholder Management officer of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DG DIGIT), which provided an explanation of the services and support available for interested parties.  The presentation highlighted that while the building blocks have been developed by the EC, the standards and specifications are free-of-charge, and all the needed software is available open-source. 

The visit continued with an introduction of eDelivery use case in the field of justice, with a session on e-CODEX, presented by Frank Woud, Chair of the permanent expert working group, and Huub Moelker, Business consultant at e-CODEX. They outlined how the e-CODEX project enables digital cross-border data exchange between courts, public prosecutors and other competent authorities. 

The second case study concerned the applicability of eDelivery in public procurement and eInvoicing. The session was led by Stephen Graham, the Business Development Lead at the OpenPeppol association. He noted that more than 150 million business transactions had been exchanged in the Peppol Network last year, and that there are already 300,000 active Peppol Network users. Among them, are the participants of EU4Digital’s eDelivery pilot between Ukraine and Poland. As the adoption of Peppol continues to expand globally, the introduction of additional services and areas of Peppol applicability are foreseen (i.e. enablement of law enforcement agencies to collect data associated with business activities).

The visit concluded by focusing on Norway’s experience in implementing Peppol’s eDelivery solution as a national standard in public procurement services, with a presentation by  Anna-Lis Berg, Norwegian Peppol Authority Lead at the Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management. This presentation and the discussion that followed gave participants an opportunity to learn from Norway’s process of implementing the solution.