If you supply vessels, you live in a world of six-digit codes. A requisition arrives from a technical superintendent listing "550101" and "174001", and your team is expected to know exactly what to quote, at what unit, at what pack size. Those codes come from the two standard catalogs of the marine supply industry: IMPA and ISSA.
What is the IMPA catalog?
The IMPA Marine Stores Guide, published by the International Marine Purchasing Association, is the most widely used product reference in ship supply. It organizes tens of thousands of marine stores — from provisions and cabin stores to deck, engine, and safety equipment — under six-digit codes grouped by category.
When a vessel sends a requisition using IMPA codes, both sides are talking about precisely the same item. That precision is what makes the catalog so valuable:
- No ambiguity about product, unit, or packaging
- Faster quoting because items don't need to be described from scratch
- Easier price comparison for buyers across suppliers
- Cleaner order history and analytics for both parties
What is the ISSA catalog?
The ISSA Ship Stores Catalogue, maintained by the International Shipsuppliers & Services Association, serves the same purpose with its own numbering scheme. Many older fleets and certain trading regions still requisition primarily with ISSA codes, so established suppliers typically need to work fluently with both.
IMPA vs. ISSA: which one matters?
The honest answer: both. The catalogs overlap heavily in what they cover, and the choice is usually made by your customer, not by you. A supplier who can only process one code set either loses orders or burns hours manually cross-referencing items — often with mistakes that surface as short shipments and credit notes.
Where suppliers lose money on catalog handling
Most quoting delays trace back to the same handful of problems:
- Requisitions arrive as PDFs or spreadsheets and get re-typed by hand
- The same IMPA item is stored three times under slightly different names
- Cross-references between IMPA, ISSA, and internal SKUs live in someone's head
- Prices per code aren't tracked historically, so every quote starts from zero
Each of these is an inventory data problem, not a people problem. The fix is a product master that treats IMPA and ISSA codes as first-class fields.
How an ERP built for ship supply handles this
MazuApp's inventory and sales modules were designed around the catalogs. Every product can carry its IMPA code, ISSA code, and your internal SKU side by side, so a requisition in either standard maps automatically to your stock, your purchase history, and your last quoted prices. Quotations that used to take an afternoon of lookup work become a matter of minutes — and every line traces back to a code both you and the vessel agree on.
Standardized catalogs made global ship supply possible. Handling them systematically is what makes it profitable.