The local autonomic government of Catalonia in Spain, the Generalitat, has accepted the use of GS1 EANCOM formats for the reception of e-invoices.
This is an important step for more that 6.000 GS1 Spain members that are already using this format to exchange EDI messages with commercial partners as this decision will smoothly expand its adoption in the public sector.
The Generalitat has been working during this year to build a communication “hub” to receive electronic invoices from the suppliers and deliver them to the different public departments. This hub, initially prepared to receive documents only in Facturae format, a national XML format defined by the central government, has been adapted to receive also the EANCOM format. Current EANCOM INVOIC users or new e-invoice users will have the possibility to use this global standard, including GLNs. The use of GLNs to identity the suppliers and recipients will avoid to the companies to adopt a proprietary identification key defined by the Generalitat.
The e-invoice project of this local government reaches the whole public sector in the geographic area:
• Town halls: From Barcelona to the smallest one in the Pyrenees.
• All departments of Generalitat
One of the most important sectors to benefit would be the healthcare as it is dependant of the local government. With the acceptance of EANCOM, the healthcare suppliers and public hospitals will be able to use the same e-commerce standards for all the messages: purchase order, despatch advice, invoice, etc. Currently more than 250 healthcare suppliers and nearly all the public health services use EANCOM for orders and despatch advices.
Public sector made e-invoicing a strategic project to increase productivity in the country and to drive SMEs into new technology. Other autonomic governments have e-invoicing in the agenda and GS1 Spain hopes the Catalan embracement of EANCOM will be followed by others.
GS1 eCom standards have also progressed in the other public sector activity: the Spanish Navy. Because of the big success on the use of GS1 XML messages in the past with some suppliers of materials for the maintenance of ships (combat systems, communication devices, engines, repairs, etc.) and provision of general merchandise (textiles, cleaning, hardware, office supplies, etc), the Navy has extend GS1 XML to a new public tender: the provision of food items to the ships for the next five years.
New electronic transactions have been added to the requirements conforming a set of 7 GS1 XML messages:
• Trade Item
• Catalogue Item Confirmation
• Order
• Order response
• Despatch Advice
• Receiving Advice
• Invoice
The Spanish Navy has implemented for first time the messages for product data alignment. The exchange will be direct machine-to-machine between the supplier (food wholesaler) and the Navy, nevertheless the GDSN standards have been implemented. This approach makes things easy for the wholesaler in case they need to publish product information in a GDSN data pool for other customers and also pave the way to use the same formats to obtain product information from the source (the manufacturers) and to send it to the customer (the Navy). back |
