Empirical evaluation of public e-procurement platforms in France

International audience; Public e-procurement is the use of electronic means for publishing, processing, exchanging and storing all the information related to institutional purchases in public organisations. It requires complex technological tools, which must comply with legal and organisational constraints. In France, such tools have actually been deployed and used in all public institutions since 1 January 2005. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the functional and legal requirements for public e-procurement in France, and to present a general evaluation of eight deployed e-procurement platforms using an empirical methodology. The functionalities and general characteristics of the studied platforms are sketched and compared on the basis of commercial and technical data.