The IMPA Marine Stores Guide provides a universal coding system to facilitate communication between ships' crew, their owner/manager offices and their marine suppliers.  The value of this coding system has been acknowledged for many years as a way to overcome language barriers and to ensure accurate specification of marine stores.

This was the original purpose of the IMPA Marine Stores Guide, and now it has a new and potentially more significant value. With the increasing adoption of electronic ship supply management (ecommerce), the Marine Stores Guide has become especially useful for the specification of stores items in electronic trading. If the purchaser includes the IMPA Number (already held in his purchasing system) for the required items in his electronic RFQ or Purchase Order and the supplier can read this IMPA Number directly into his sales order system, matching it to the appropriate stock item.

The use of the IMPA Marine Stores Guide in ecommerce has highlighted a limitation of the original paper-based catalogue which is that it is only updated once every 4-5 years. In the intervening period, certain items may become obscelete and others may need to be added to the guide.  IMPA has recognised this limitation and will, from now on, release updates to the catalogue on a six-monthly cycle. These updates will only be available in electronic form.

To use the IMPA Marine Stores Guide in electronic form (to import the code data into your purchasing or sales order system), you will need to purchase an IMPA Marine Stores Guide Data Licence.