Open meeting work group 3

WORKSHOP
ELECTRONIC INVOICES, PHASE 3

Open Meeting – WORK GROUP 3

12 December 2011, Brussels

Workgroup 3 Background
 The core of the group were refugees from Phase 2 with an interest in progressing
e-Invoicing and we trawled far and wide to add contributors, in all cases we wished
and attempted to reach out to as broad a range of input as possible

 Originally we started with a plan to deliver a single CWA and it very soon grew to
have two substantial attachments,
 Model Interoperability Agreement
 WG3 elected to focus only on the Four corner model between two SPs
 Conformance Criteria
 A range of guidelines for Service Providers entering into e-invoicing . One of which was
to cover Addressing & Routing After 50% of our available time in Phase 3 the EU
Commission made a request to CEN and specifically Phase 3 to raise the profile of our
work such that A&R became a stand alone document. Therefore….

 We now have three CWAs to present
 Conformance Criteria
 Model Interoperability Agreement
 A position / review paper on Addressing & Routing.
2005 CEN – all rights reserved

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Mode of operation of WG3

The Face-2-Face meetings we held were

• Madrid - 29th April 2010
• Brussels - 9-10th June 2010
• Brussels - 8-9th July 2010
• Brussels - 16-17th September 2010
• Brussels - 29th September 2010
• Berlin - 14-16th December 2010
• Brussels - 9-10th February 2011
• Copenhagen - 4-5th April 2011
• Zagreb - 20-21st June 2011
• Brussels - 7-8th November 2011

And some of these were supplemented with G2M (virtual) meetings, and
there was voluminous email traffic all across Europe.

Contributors in Work Group 3
Hubert Hohenstein (Co-Chair) Chair e-Invoicing Alliance Germany
Dave Wallis (Co-Chair) OFS Portal
Jens Abol PEPPOL,DIFI
Phillip Benoit SERRES
Francis Berthomieu France Telecom
Charles Bryant EBA
Andrea Caccia Caccia Studio
Falasca Cristian Consorzio CBI
Mounir El-Khoury (Technical Editor) MKE
Jostein Fromyr PEPPOL Edisys
Eva Hervidsson Nordea Bank
Paul Hojka UK Payments Administration
Sarah Hysen Swedbank
Marcus Laube Crossinx
William Le Sage OFS Portal
Tuija Lompolojärvi Tieto
Soren Lenartson Ooidata/SFTI
Tim McGrath PEPPOL
Adrian Müller Müller Consulting
Giacomo Paci Consorzio CBI
Peter Potgieser RBS - Royal Bank of Scotland
Toni Grossi Infodom
William Sanpiero SERRES
Cyrille Sauterau DESKOM
Phillip Schmandt OFS Portal
Ifor Williams Fundtech

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Conformance Criteria

Proliferation of standards and the lack of clear interoperability guidelines,
as well as legal barriers, have acted as a hindrance to the uptake of e-
business and e-invoicing by both SMEs and larger organizations.

This is well illustrated in the Expert Group report and the Commission’s
“Reaping the Benefits” communication. It is valid as a starting point for this
CWA:

Conformance Criteria for Interoperability between
Electronic Invoicing Services.

This CWA is intended for the use of providers of e-invoicing services to
their customers. However it also has implications for, and will be of value
to trading parties, both buyers and sellers and their service and solution
providers.



This Workgroup finally settled on 7 criteria which encompassed the main
elements to be considered when implementing e-Invoicing within Europe which
would, in time drive the market towards conformance.

1. All market participants should use and conform to an agreed terminology. For this
purpose, the glossary is now a Part of the Code of Practice, another document in Phase 3
to be addressed separately.

2. All market participants should facilitate their customers’ compliance with legal and
regulatory provisions using the most efficient and cost effective methodologies possible.

3. All market participants entering interoperability agreements with each other should use
and promote the final form of the Model Interoperability Agreement. Such interoperability
agreements between service providers will include a trusted framework that protects the
interests of trading parties, especially SMEs and consumers.

4. All market participants should support the use of open and royalty-free standards
promulgated by international standards organizations for invoice content and data formats
as they become accepted by the market.

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5. All market participants should use and support open and royalty-free technology
standards for connectivity and messaging between platforms in order to achieve the
objectives of interoperability.

6. E-Invoicing Services should over time adopt practices that foster convergence for
the addressing and routing of e-invoice and related messages containing electronic
business documents. This should include addressing and routing solutions that
may be used without regard as to whether the trading parties have elected to use a
service provider or not. See separate CWA

7. No requirement, whether explicit or implicit, should be placed on trading parties to
use either a two, three or four party model and all trading parties should remain free
to select the model most appropriate for that trading party’s business.


Model Interoperability Agreement

The document has undergone rigorous debate and is all the better for it.
It has already been volunteered to a large group of European SPs and
they thought it had great potential as vehicle for their use.

There will always be those who thought it should have a different
structure, but after discussion across the whole of Phase 3’s four
workgroups, it was agreed we settle on a bi-lateral, between two service
providers. There was discussion with groups outside of CEN, such as
PEPPOL to assess prior work, parallel efforts and other natural
symbiotics for the vehicle ( document ) we were to create.

At the beginning of the WG3 project and having identified this element
of work as having the potential for significant impact in the Service
Provider industry across Europe, it was very important to define what
the Agreement would cover in scope and what was outside.

To graphically describe this….

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Generic models

‘Two Corner’ model, ‘Three Corner’ model, 99% of the time it is
direct integrations a buyer contracted Network Service
between buyer & seller, Provider to manage the connections
between the buyer and its supplier
community


Generic models

‘Four Corner’ model, buyer and seller contract their own Network
Service Provider to manage their connections to their community


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Model

Interoperability

Agreement

Structure


Model Interoperability Agreement
We researched widely to find and then use base examples ( German / Global
/ etc ) and drew upon these for inspiration to build a robust legal vehicle.

• It does not touch any contractual arrangements between the SP and their
customers
• It remains technology neutral whilst promoting open standards between
SPs
• It is very firm on Data Ownership and Confidentiality
• All technical details between the two SPs who would be signatories to
this document are allowed to be addressed and mutually agreed in the
“Description of Services” found as an Appendix. This leaves all the key
legal structures in the body of the agreement and ensure separation from
all technical elements.
• Whilst there was very broad agreement on the vast majority of the
document, we failed to secure unanimity on two elements ( from one
contributor ).

We believe this is a document that is ready when ratified by CEN and can be
tried out in real life, as an Interoperability Agreement between two SP.

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Addressing and Routing

• At the commencement of Phase 3 of CEN’s e-Invoicing Project,
this topic was initially developed and agreed amongst our WG3
contributors to be a candidate to be a Conformance Criteria.
• Approximately half way through our available work time, the
Commission issued their document Reaping the benefits of
electronic invoicing for Europe Brussels, 2 December 2010 COM(2010) 712 final.
Within it,
5. A STRATEGY TO FOSTER THE UPTAKE OF ELECTRONIC INVOICING
5.1. Key priorities to promote e-invoicing within the EU
5.1.3. Stimulate an environment that creates maximum reach



• As a result CEN was requested through the Phase 3
work plan to specifically raise the profile of this topic.

• WG3 took up the challenge

• WG decided to create a separate standalone CWA, but
as we dug deeper we realised that with the remaining
time and resources available, all we could do was
create a position paper and identify some necessary
areas for further investigation and work.


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• Addressing: Managing business identifiers ( looking
at the address on the envelope ) referring to parties
and resolve them to Routing information

• Different unique business identifier schemes for
Addressing are in place. Official national numbers (e.g.
VAT) or private systems (e.g. GLN, DUNS)

• Main challenge: How to bring them under a
common umbrella for interoperability?

• Solution: Standardized embedding of identifiers
“allocation of numbers to numbers” (meta-identification)

• There are two ‘camps’ ( schools of thought ) emerging within
Europe regarding one aspect of Addressing & Routing.

1. Those who are implementing publicly available registers for
Addressing and who favour a common system for these
registers. Some projects such as PEPPOL are enforcing some
level of public registry

This would show that registry-initiatives are happening e.g.
national initiatives such as Denmark and Switzerland.

2. Those who see this as a big step too far in the availability of
commercially sensitive information ( c.f. to companies
accessing mailing lists for Christmas catalogues to
competitors. )

Currently this is a serious sticking point in progressing elements of
technical agreement, and would require further detailed discussions

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Work Group 3

Thank you – Questions ?


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Open meeting work group 3

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