PPI4HPC Whitepaper “Lessons Learned on Legal Aspects” just published

The PPI4HPC consortium has just published a Whitepaper under the title “Lessons Learned on Legal Aspects”. The document provides details on the procedure that the partners undertook to initiate and run the joint public procurement process and the legal lessons that they learnt along the course of actions.

In particular, under the PPI4HPC project, funded by the European Commission (call EINFRA-21-2017), a group of leading European supercomputing centres (BSC in Spain, CINECA in Italy, Forschungszentrum Juelich-JSC in Germany and GENCI/CEA in France) formed a buyer’s group to execute a joint Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) for the first time in the area of HPC.

The process was divided into several steps: the project setup, the preparation of the procurement and the execution of the procurement. Based on the experience of this procurement, recommendations derived from lessons learned include:

• Building early in the project motivated and available teams (technical/legal experts with some experts with double competency) is key to success.
• Legal consultancy with knowledge about the relevant legal aspects in the countries of all the public procurers involved is very important.
• Clear definition of the role and liability of the different partners during the whole procurement procedure is necessary and needs to be formalised before the start of the procurement.
• Strategies to reduce the likelihood or at least the impact of conflicts between the law of the country of the lead procurer and the law of the countries of the local procurers need to be devised
• Wide and fair information to the market should be organised.
• Awareness among all relevant stakeholders involved at the procuring sites about the legal procedures and continues exchange of information during the execution of the local procurement procedures was found to be important.

Read the document