Monday 6 November 2017
Declan has responsibility at Principal level for the Office of Government Procurement’s eInvoicing programme. Prior to his appointment he held the position of Head of IT with one of Ireland’s leading e-Procurement services providers and has over 20 years’ experience in technology development, delivery and management within the telecoms, financial and IT sectors and was actively involved in the development and implementation of PEPPOL infrastructure. He will discuss the new European Standards for eInvoicing and the use of PEPPOL in Ireland at this year’s conference on Public Procurement: Technology-driven Public Procurement.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step”.
From small steps to giant leaps, in many cases history tells us that significant changes and developments are more often than not triggered by a series of small evolutionary events.
Europe, across both public and private sectors, has been on the path to eProcurement for many years now, convinced of its benefits and potential to drive efficiencies.
“Switching to eProcurement, and particularly to eInvoicing, can bring significant savings and make life easier both for the Governments and for the thousands of businesses active in the Internal Market”, according to Michel Barnier, European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, in a Commission press release from June 2013.
Even before then, the European Commission had been making steady progress to establish a Pan-European eProcurement model and network infrastructure, through PEPPOL, providing for interoperability across public sectors in all Member States and signifying a key step towards a Digital Single Market.
Now, in 2017, conditions have been set for ground-breaking progress over the next 18 months to establishing eProcurement as the Norm across public procurement regimes in Europe.
With the publication of the European Standard (Norm) on eInvoicing in October triggering the legal obligation on all Public Sector Bodies to accept eInvoices by April 2019, and the continuous growth in the use of PEPPOL to enable businesses to communicate electronically with more and more European public sector entities, there is a momentum building across both public and private sector eInvoicing communities towards fully realising the benefits and efficiencies of digitising the procurement process.
Speaking at the recent launch of the European Standard (Norm) on eInvoicing, Deputy Director General of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SME, Ms Irmfried Schwimann, noted:
“The European eInvoicing Directive (2014/55/EU) and an established PEPPOL network, that enables businesses ‘Connect Once and Connect to All’ public sector entities across Europe, creates an impetus in all Member States to modernise public administrations and will facilitate businesses and public bodies in reducing their costs, increasing transparency, innovating new business processes and moving to a digital economy.”
To understand more about the newly-published European Standard on eInvoicing: the Irish Implications and the role of PEPPOL, Declan McCormack will be speaking at the PAI Annual Conference on Procurement on Friday 10 November 2017.
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