Norway – Country Profile

Norway – Country Profile

National e-Procurement context

The Norwegian government has set out public sector targets for e-procurement, in alignment with broader European initiatives. Within Norway, Difi (Agency for Public Management and eGovernment) is officially empowered to develop frameworks and tools for encouraging the adoption of e-Procurement in the public sector. This mandate is supported by legislation passed in 2012, which requires that Norwegian public sector entities must utilize electronic invoicing for all procurement activities.

Since the 1st of July 2011, it became mandatory for all central government entities to receive invoices electronically in a standard format; and from the 1st of July 2012 it became mandatory for central government entities to require their suppliers to invoice them electronically using the EHF format – a national implementation of the Peppol Business Interoperability Specifications (BIS) – recommending use of the Peppol Transport Infrastructure for business document exchange.

Norway’s e-procurement infrastructure is built around the pan-European Peppol standards and network, supplemented by specific national and EU-based systems. This approach helps ensure fast adoption though a high degree of compatibility with buyers’ and sellers’ existing enterprise management and procurement solutions.

Both buyers and sellers can choose to establish their own Access Point or to enter into an agreement with any of the service providers connected to the Peppol Transport Infrastructure in Norway, or throughout Europe.

For more information about the Norwegian eProcurement infrastructure, please click here

It is expected that the use of electronic means for the automation of the pre-award procurement processes will be mandatory from 2016.

Use of Peppol

Use of Peppol is recommended by the Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation.

The following Peppol components are in use in Norway:  e-Catalogue, e-Ordering, e-Invoicing, credit note and payment reminder, exchanged through the Peppol transport infrastructure.

Please click here to see the complete e-procurement process and the tools Difi provides to support it.

The use of Peppol–based solutions has grown steadily in Norway, registering the following results, as of October 2018:

• 41 Access Points in production
• More than 121.000 end-users enabled as Peppol receivers
• Over 8 million transactions per month

To see the complete list of Peppol receivers in Norway, please click here

Peppol Authority

Difi, the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and e-Government, is the Peppol Authority in Norway. Difi authorise Norwegian-registered access points and operate the ELMA registry (Peppol Service Metadata Publisher) containing the identities and receiving capabilities of all Norwegian public and private sector entities that communicate using the transport infrastructure.

In order to facilitate technology adoption, Difi offers the Oxalis open source sample implementations for Peppol Access Points, which are widely used by service providers across Europe.

Difi support the private sector Access Point providers and users of EHF/Peppol BIS through regular meetings, web pages and other means.

Peppol Service Metadata Publisher (SMP)

ELMA is the national Peppol Service Metadata Publisher (SMP) managed by Difi. The ELMA registry is used by the access points to verify the identity of individual participants, find the location of the access point where they can be reached, and to confirm their functional capabilities: the types of documents (EHF/Peppol BIS) or data that the participant can send or receive via the Peppol infrastructure.

Peppol support provided by the Peppol Authority

Onboarding of Contracting

Difi has a dedicated team to support onboarding of Peppol Access Point providers, providing guidance about the set up and testing access point services.

Difi provides support to ICT providers through detailed guides that are available about setting up and using the Norwegian e-procurement infrastructure:
http://www.anskaffelser.no/e-procurement/guides/how-guides

and https://vefa.difi.no/peppol/

Peppol Transport Infrastructure Agreements (TIA)

Click here to download the Peppol Transport Infrastructure Agreements provided by Difi.

Enhanced use of the Peppol infrastructure

In addition to the use of the Peppol infrastructure for eProcurement, Difi has started to use it in a more general eGovernment context. The ISO 20022 payment implementation  (https://vefa.difi.no/iso20022/) is using the Peppol infrastructure added with an extra layer of end-to-end (corner1-corner4) security (Secrecy, Authenticity, Integrity and Traceability).

Contact points

Access Points: aksesspunkt@difi.no
EHF format: ehf@difi.no
ELMA Registry: elma@difi.no
Electronic invoicing: elektronisk.faktura@difi.no

Representative: Jens Aabol/Klaus Vilstrup Pedersen, Difi