UBL Pre-Award Procurement Subcommittee

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Pre-Award subcomittee meeting 05/02/2025

  • 1.  Pre-Award subcomittee meeting 05/02/2025

    Posted 03-17-2025 12:36

    Attendees: Paloma Arillo, Kenneth Bengtsson, Paul Donohoe, Yves Jordan, Dragos Stoica 

     

    The subcommittee is looking at the eForms , the eProcurement Ontology, the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) and UBL to harmonise the different projects as far as possible considering time constraints and come forward with any solutions that could be proposed for UBL 2.5 

    Concept discussed: eForms Organisation.  

    A set of proposals for changes to UBL relating to organisations / cac: Partywas presented. 

    Most elements required by organisations in eForms exist in the UBL cac:Party element (type PartyType).  eForms has structures to centralise information, so extensions have been created to avoid repeating information for given organisations used several times in the same document.  These extensions have been created at the top level of a notice. 

    The following proposals were presented:  

    1. efac:Touch Pointàefac:Organization was created to hold all the information relating to a single oganisation 
      Within efac:Organization, two main structures were created:  

    • efac:Company holds the address, contact details and legal ID for the organisation 

    • efac:TouchPoint is a repeatable structure that holds the address and contact details for departments/units within the organisation that are responsible for fulfilling different roles within the procurement. This concept of a role-based "department"  does not exist in UBL. 

    In the eProcurement Ontology, there is a slightly different implementation.  An agent in role is played by an organisation and the agent in role can have a contact point that is specific to the role rather than the organisation. 

    The proposal for UBL is to create a new ASBIE of cac:Party named cac:SubParty, and reference cac:SubParty from within cac:Party 
    Another proposal would be tocreate a new element, not an ASBIE of cac:Party, but which can contain one or more instances of cac:Party. This may be more in line with the current use cases for cac:Party.  
    It was agreed to review existing UBL elements to find potential useful analogs. 

    1. Add cbc:ListedOnRegulatedMarketIndicator and cbc:CompanySizeCode to cac:Party. Economic Operators that submit tenders need to provide the information about the size of their companies and whether they are listed on a regulated market. The code list is published in EU Voc as economic-operator-size. The implementation in eProcurement Ontology is similar: both size and a regulated market indicator are properties of a Business class, which is a specialisation of the Organisation class. It was proposed to add two new elements cbc:ListedOnRegulatedMarketIndicator and  cbc:CompanySizeCode to cac:Party. It is thought that these two properties might be of interest to other use cases of UBL. 

    1. Add cac:AcquiringCPBParty and cac:AwardingCPBParty to cac:TenderingTerms. 

    Buyers as organisations have different roles within procurement. A buyer organisation can acquire goods for its own use and for use by other buyers; or it can award public contracts for goods or works that allows other organisations to purchase within those contracts. 

    In the eProcurement Ontology the Buyer is a specialization of an Agent in role, and Awarding CPB and Acquiring CPB are mutually exclusive specialisations of Buyer. In eForms both roles are indicators but used at the level of a notice, which means these roles do not change per Lot.  
    It is not clear if an organisation can have both roles within a procurement procedure, or if these roles can vary per Lot within a single notice. These issues are under discussion with DG GROW. 
    An initial proposal is to declare these roles within cac:TenderingParty, similar to other roles performed by buyer organisations. These would be new elements declared as PartyType, i.e. ASBIEs of cac:Party. These would then be available or use at notice or at Lot level.  

     

     

    Kenneth said that many ASBIEs of cac:Party have been created, and cac:Party has also been used in many elements, and now is a good time to review these. He suggested that we use a day of the face-to-face meeting in April to discuss these uses, and the PartyType structure itself.  

    Yves asked Kenneth if the format and content of the presentation was adequate for discussion at the face-to-face meeting. Kenneth replied that it was. 

     



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    Natalie MURIC
    Publications Office of the European Union
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