Itella Creating eProcurement Infrastructure in Europe and Business Opportunities for Community Users

Acknowledged as European core contributor to PEPPOL, Itella Information has announced several customer implementations that have already been taken into production in Scandinavia, and aimes to create more challenging infrastructural opportunities within the eProcurement community, in the very short time frame set by the project.

PEPPOL (Pan-European Public Procurement Online) is part of the European Commission‘s Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme’s ICT Policy Support Programme, designed to build and consolidate a common EU eProcurement market, by interconnecting participants with the market and supporting interoperability across borders. PEPPOL plans to have a fully functional eProcurement community by 2015, based of three User Group categories: Contracting Authorities, Economic Operators and Service Providers (ICT Industry Experts).

Itella Information functions as a Service Provider and Access Point within the project. The company is one of the few PEPPOL project partners able to meet the uncompromising timelines set for the European online procurement market, and has more to give to the market, due to its unique PEPPOL-compliant end-to-end solutions portfolio, already in use throughout Europe outside the project. Itella is currently the only Service Provider within the project presenting this capability on a cross-border scale.

As its first PEPPOL customer implementations are already in production in Scandinavia, Itella Information plans to expand the project to countries where a cross-border infrastructure has yet to be created and developed. According to Itella, this represents the main challenge of the project:

“When creating a common eProcurement market, the real challenge lies in creating interoperability within networks displaying strong local specific features. Itella Information is dedicated to e-infrastructure development and standardization in Europe and this is what we are committed to delivering as PEPPOL Project Partner”, says Jari Annala, Vice President, Itella Information Oy.

Itella Information is a Service Provider partner in the PEPPOL project due to its very large volumes registered in real supply chain automation messaging and to its transnational expertise, which means that Itella can enable companies and public authorities to become PEPPOL community users.

“Gaining true business value takes more than just transition to e-invoicing; a shift to a fully-automated purchasing process is the key. A high automation rate is the best indicator of a successful transition, as automation requires the use of fewer resources and generates better control of the supply chain. For PEPPOL community users, automation is not an option, but a requirement,” Vice President Annala added.

Itella Information offers end-to-end solutions matching PEPPOL agreements and is capable of meeting customers’ individual business needs. Itella’s participation in the PEPPOL project adds to a long list of European forums and associations, such as EESPA and CEN, with a focus on e-tranzactional strandardization, where Itella makes its contribution as a Pan-European solution expert in financial process optimization.

Further information:
Tiina Härkönen, Head of Communications Itella Information, +35 85 03 84 31 62