Published on July 20th 2010

A new 12-month licence period and new pricing structure have been unveiled by IMPA to further widen access to its ever-popular Marine Stores Guide Data Service.

As numerous users around the globe already know, 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.

Companies wanting to use the IMPA MSG Data Service in their procurement need to have a data licence agreement, which is issued either by the IMPA office in the UK or via a number of resellers around the world.

This straightforward agreement is available in two guises – one for suppliers and one for ship owners/operators – and sets out the revised licence terms and fees.

Full details are in a new document - ‘An Introduction to the IMPA Marine Stores Guide Data Service’ - that can be downloaded from the new Marine Stores Guide website www.marinestoresguide.com. A copy of the agreement is included in the document and can be used to apply for a licence.

The data is available in a number of different formats for ease of integration with procurement systems – for instance, it can be used as a Microsoft Excel file or as a CSV data file.

Once companies have purchased the MSG Data, they will be issued with a serial number so they can download the data quickly and easily from the Marine Stores Guide website and import it into their IT systems. Six-monthly updates will be issued in the same way.