What commodity code domains and versions are commonly used on the SAP Business Network?

Commodity codes are used to classify products and services for use throughout the global marketplace. These codes enable procurement applications to display products and services in a hierarchy that makes sense to users.

Buyers can create business and approval rules that use commodity codes to give special treatment to certain kinds of products. For example, a buyer's procurement system can be configured to:

• Prevent subsets of employees from seeing product types that they would never need.
• Require specific organizations to approve the purchase of certain kinds of products. For example, the Information Technology department might need to approve all requests for computer-related equipment.

Commodity codes are also used by buyers' Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and for enterprise report generation.

Suppliers can utilize any commodity coding system (classification domain) in their catalogs. However, both catalogs and procurement applications must use the same system, so if suppliers use a non-standard system, they must communicate its details to all buyers that use their catalogs. They can include multiple commodity coding systems in the same catalog so it can be used by diverse customers. If a buyer uses custom commodity codes, it needs to communicate those codes to all of its suppliers.

Examples of Commodity Code Domains

Each catalog item must have at least one domain-specific commodity code that maps to the domain specified for the CODEFORMAT field in the catalog header. Suppliers can override the commodity code at the line-item level of the catalog. The following are examples of commonly used commodity code domains on the SAP Business Network (click the link for each to learn more about the domain):

• UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Products and Services Code)
• eCl@ss (Standardized Material and Service Classification)
• NAICS (North American Industry Classification System)
• ISIC (International Standard Industrial Classification)

Because the recommended classification domain for the SAP Business Network is the UNSPSC domain, these are the only codes that the SAP Business Network validates. This standard is a universally accepted coding system that classifies products and services across a broad range of suppliers and industries. Catalogs that use this system can be used by most customers.?The Electronic Commerce Code Management Association (ECCMA) periodically releases new versions of the UNSPSC. Later versions cover more products and services, reorganize existing commodities, and assign them new codes.

By default, the SAP Business Network uses ECCMA version 13.5 and UNSPSC version UNSPSC v9.0501. The UNSPSC codes used in catalogs support version 13.5.?The UNSPSC version, UNSPSC v9.0501, corresponds to the ECCMA version 13.5.?For more information about the mapping between ECCMA and UNSPSC, reference the resources on the ECCMA site.

SAP Business Network for Procurement & Supply Chain > Catalogs
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