Our Business Cases

The two public administration solutions SEPPAS and EDP are validating the project’s technology, in a customised manner, for the Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration and the Municipality of Zaragoza in Spain.

Oesia’s COPIN platform focuses on various public administrations across Europe aiming to boost economic development. This is done by providing information to small and micro enterprises and allowing them better access to public contracts. Cerved’s VIPS solution is aiming to simplify the procurement decision process for procurement managers in the private sector.

The online tools with two business cases PITO and BMBV from Open Opps are validating the two project scenarios: demand management aimed at public administration customer segments on the one hand, and the economic development in the private sector with a focus on SME customer segment on the other. Finally the RS business case from OpenCorporates is a commercialisation of the reconciliation technology that is being developed in the project.

Open Opps is creating an API that aggregates tender and contracting data from across Europe and the world. The goal is to help governments, trade advisors, suppliers and researchers by providing a single, standardised point of access for data, making it easy to collect data and undertake analysis without having to first gather and standardise the data.

Access to the data provided by our API allows partners to build their own analytics, provide alert services and disseminate this information for anyone to use. The commitment to publishing data openly means that the partners can republish this in any form. Easy access to data can open up buyer and supplier markets to innovation as companies from one country can bring new insight into the markets of another. Moreover, this data underpins the TBFY e-procurement knowledge graph and will help populate the procurement documents in this knowledge graph.

In order to further promote open availability of our data spanning 90 countries, Open Opps is creating a web application that will allow easy access to data on public procurement from Europe. Users will be able to search, sort, visualise and download global procurement data as well as deep dive into further detail such as tenders, spend, competitors, buyers and categories.

Through access to this global procurement data at a click of a button, we envision a level playing field for suppliers and buyers alike, allowing for better awareness of where opportunities are, accessibility to markets and possibilities to benchmark. The benefit is a more open, accountable and quantifiable system of public procurement that offers dynamism to purchasers and suppliers alike. The benefit to the e-procurement knowledge graph is that through our website, we can test what data users want to see and how best to represent that data.

OpenCorporates is building a new reconciliation service (aka entity resolution) to enable users to match references (names, etc) to companies to their highly trusted, 150m+ global database of companies. This is part of OpenCorporates long term strategy to make the connections between entities across different jurisdictions transparent, including beneficial owners, subsidiaries and now suppliers. Users will be able use both a powerful new custom API, and the popular OpenRefine data-wrangling problem to interface with OpenCorporates powerful reconciliation algorithms and clean up dirty data and match to canonical legal entity records.

As part of the TheyBuyForYou project OpenCorporates will be including new sources of non-company and supplier data that will give additional data points and further confidence to those trying to understand supplier relationships, greatly benefiting the e-procurement knowledge graph.

Zaragoza is going to develop an economic information website that will offer visualisation services and dashboards that will help to understand and analyse the City Council’s economic expenditure and will make it easier to obtain socio-economic information. The website will further include services that will make it possible to search for and reuse data-sets related to municipal management and the city’s socio-economic fundamentals.

The main goals:

1. Boost the accountability to citizens by improving the information provided in the contracting processes (linking invoices with contracts, report generation…).
2. Disseminate socio-economic knowledge of the city.
3. Improve the efficiency in municipal management: the website aims to be a tool for management and supervision, allowing the comparison of contracts and facilitating the detection of anomalies.
All the information and services will be destined to managers, reusers and citizens in general and will be published in open data on the municipal website.

For the implementation of this business case Oesía is developing a web platform to provide information and analytics of tenders among the EU. The main purpose of this solution is to help public administrations to improve their efficiency in their purchasing processes and results. Another objective is to facilitate the public administration or enterprises associations, a tool for providing to their enterprises, tender information with strong searching and analysis capabilities. This is expected to specially impact small enterprise business opportunities. While large companies can absorb the cost of seeking and applying for tenders, SMEs are typically locked out of markets, simply due to the high cost of finding the right information.

COPIN and the knowledge graphs are being designed in parallel; while COPIN defines the information needs regarding especially tender process data and the public administrations and enterprise’s needs, the knowledge graphs provide the structure, the relation and the way of getting this information.
For Oesía, this business case means to improve the current offer of ICT services and products designed to empower public administration’s management, procurement, online services and public policies.

In the European Union more than 2.000 billion EUR are spent on public procurement and it is very important that the whole process is conducted in a very transparent way. In Slovenia in 2017 more 4,7 billion EUR were spent on public procurement and as part of our work in TBFY we aim to present a clear picture how this money was spent. The objective of the business cases presented by the Ministry of Public Administration of Slovenia in this project is twofold:

One is to create an interactive dashboard, in which public procurement data will be presented to the public almost in real-time.

The second aspect is to apply computer algorithms to our public procurement databases to detect patterns which may indicate unwanted behaviour such as collusion, bid rigging or similar. This will be presented with the aim to ensure openness and fairness in the process of public procurement.

Relying only on specific suppliers for procurement leads to a run down of competing suppliers and limits potential cost reductions and profit, as with these unnecessary costs companies can find themselves lagging behind their competition. With this in mind Cerved is developing the Vendor Intelligence Procurement Solution (VIPS): a set of services supporting informed procurement decisions, aimed at procurement managers in corporate companies, banks and public administrations in Italy. These services will be designed for easy integration in existing e-procurement spend management solutions and will be focused on: supplier risk monitoring through their profile enrichment, getting the right information for supplier based on corporate databases and historical records on shared contracts, preference based supplier ranking and discovery of new suppliers through procurement oriented capability classification.

Cerved’s strategy is to support its customers throughout their lifecycle with products for marketing solutions, credit information and credit collection, the new solution VIPS will additionally enrich Cerved’s existing offerings with focus on customer tasks for supplier monitoring, antifraud applications and procurement decisions. The solution will have the advantage of directly relying on data around procurement including the tender content from the TheyBuyForYou procurement knowledge graph and historical procurement data interlinked with Cerved’s rich proprietary data sources.