One major issue impacting the competitiveness of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) across the European business-to-business sector (B2B) is the growing administration burden of legal and compliance documentation. Until now, each time a company responds to a request for tender, it has to compile and supply a considerable number of certificates and documents. In addition, once a contract is signed with a customer, the supplier must share updated certificates and the customer verify them. This is time-consuming and expensive for both customers and suppliers, impacting competitiveness.
ALG – Attestation Légale (ALG) was launched in 2010, with the aim of providing a concrete solution to this issue in the Construction sector.
Based upon a business model in which it is the subcontractors who finances the solution, the OFA solution quickly became a reference for the big accounts of the sector, who have prescribed the use of our platform to their subcontractors. ALG has managed to ensure its growth by combining a solution adapted to the needs of its clients, supported by significant human resources dedicated to customer care, but also with a strong position toward interoperability. From the beginning, Renaud Sornin, ALG founder, wanted to offer to its customers the interoperability of their data.
By agreeing with its main competitor on a common standard, ALG provide its customers the opportunity to be visible on both platforms, allowing them to open their business opportunities.
The overall objective of the Once For All project is to design and create a new European-wide interoperable platform that connects companies, secures customer-supplier relationships and enables companies to share their administrative documents with customers more easily. We refer to it as a form of ‘LinkedIn’ for the B2B sector. Instead of having to compile mandatory documents over and over again, businesses only need to do so once. This will save them valuable time and money, as well as promote trust and security.
What makes the project truly disruptive and unique is the interoperability model – we are bringing competitors and stakeholders together to cooperate in order to build and use a platform that will benefit all parties.
We divided our workload in seven Work Packages structured around three objectives:
- Objective 1: ‘Glocalize’ the ALG secured business network: turn the European standard into a platform managing several countries and markets, and dealing at the same time with local parameters and specific needs, especially local regulations (see WP2);
- Objective 2: Prepare for commercialization by identifying and convincing Majors in 2 targeted countries and 3 markets: Germany and Spain, construction, transport and utilities (WP5 and WP6);
- Objective 3: Define an open interoperability standard with competitors from each of the targeted countries, which can connect any public and private organizations (WP3). This standard being compliant with privacy protection rules to be defined (WP4).
