eProcurement Forum Uptake of pre-awarding phases ... - ePractice.eu

This main objective can be achieved if all the experts are encouraged to share their
knowledge and experience with their peers and, conversely, profit of the others’
successes and failures. The community is mainly focused on technical and
organisational aspects related to the implementation and usage of electronic solutions
that support the different phases and procedures of Public Procurement.
In January 2008 the Kick Off workshop officially launched the eProcurement Community:
it represented a great success in terms of attending people (97 experts from all over
Europe) and overall satisfaction. Under these encouraging auspices, the story of the
eProcurement Forum started.
It rapidly grew in size and now, after 2 years, counts more then 550 members: it is open
to practitioners from European administrations, from public and private organisations,
from academia and research centres.
All the community members are encouraged to freely contribute to the community by
telling stories about their experience with the design, implementation and use of
eProcurement systems, that is to create “cases”. They can also contribute by sharing the
outcomes of feasibility studies, standardization activities, surveys or pilot actions, made
available in the form of freely accessible documents.
It is not an official Commission site, even if the Commission has appointed several
facilitators to create a team whose main task is identifying and following the most
relevant activities in the eProcurement field or related topics and keep the experts
updated on their objectives, progresses and achievements.
Therefore the facilitators provide support to the community members, encourage and
filter contributions, produce guidelines and other documents, support the organisation of
events and launch other initiatives aimed at promoting the uptake of eProcurement.
They can be contacted directly, by clicking on their profiles (visible on the homepage of
the community) or sending an email to eprocurement@epractice.eu
Membership is open to everyone, but the community has been thought in order to
provide useful contents and support to specific groups which are usually the targets of
Invitations and dissemination activities. These groups, from a preliminary but not
necessarily exhaustive analysis are:
• Responsibles of development, adoption and use of eProcurement systems within
Public Administrations, probably the most natural target;
• Responsibles of development, adoption and use of eProcurement systems within
other large institutions that conducts complex procurement procedures;
• Members of standardisation bodies with specific activities in eProcurement and
eBusiness;
• Members of other working groups or communities (such as the EULab, the Public
Procurement network, etc...);
• People from Academia or from research organisations with interests in legal and
technical aspects of eProcurement;
• Consortia working on research or piloting projects dealing with eProcurement or
related topics, such as PEPPOL, PROCURE or ELLECTRAWeb
• Other projects funded by European or National programmes;
• Experts from the private sector (such as IT companies, consultants, financial
institutions);
Report on the “Uptake of pre-awarding phases in eProcurement” Workshop – Vienna, 22nd
February 2010
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