The Marine Stores Guide (often abbreviated MSG) is the reference catalogue of marine store items published by the International Marine Purchasing Association. It lists tens of thousands of items commonly supplied to ships, each with a description, an illustration, a unit of measure and a six-digit IMPA code. It has become a de facto common language for ship supply, giving buyers and chandlers worldwide a single, shared way to describe what is being requisitioned, quoted and delivered.
What the guide contains
The guide is organised into sections covering the full range of vessel needs, including deck and engine stores, ropes and rigging, tools, paints and chemicals, safety and firefighting equipment, galley and catering items, cabin stores, medical supplies and stationery. Each entry pairs a plain description with its code and an image, which is particularly useful when crews and suppliers speak different first languages, because the picture and the code remove ambiguity that words alone can introduce.
Why the Marine Stores Guide matters
Ship supply is a global trade in which a buyer, a vessel and a supplier may each be in a different country. The Marine Stores Guide lets all three refer to the same item by the same code, which reduces wrong-item deliveries, speeds up quoting, and makes invoices easy to reconcile against orders. When a requisition is built from guide codes, every downstream step, from quote to delivery note, can be checked against a single source of truth.
The Marine Stores Guide in software
Buyers rarely send perfectly coded requisitions; real RFQs arrive as emails, spreadsheets and PDFs full of free text. Maritime procurement software bridges that gap by matching those descriptions back to Marine Stores Guide codes automatically, so a messy enquiry becomes a clean, coded quote. The guide, in other words, is the backbone that makes automated RFQ processing accurate.
Keeping the guide current
The Marine Stores Guide is revised over time as items are added, updated or withdrawn, and using a current reference matters. If a buyer codes from one edition and a supplier prices from another, a small number of items may not line up, which reintroduces exactly the ambiguity the guide is meant to remove. In practice this is another argument for software that maps requisitions to codes automatically, because a maintained system can keep pace with catalogue changes more reliably than manual lookup.
