Coding International

Coding International was called the NSV Centre prior to privatisation in 1999, and has maintained the National Supplies Vocabulary (NSV) for over 30 years.  This unique database over purchasing history for over 500,000 commonly purchased items by NHS and UK government bodies, was a key resource for the SpendInsight project.

The Coding International team maintain NSV, along with other popular UK government coding schemes such as Pro-class, from their offices in Southampton.  The team have category experts across the full range of purchasing, and have completely cross mapped all the popular classification systems including:-

  • NSV
  • NPC
  • NHS eclass
  • ProClass
  • CPV and

NSV and ProClass stand out as professionally managed coding and classification systems.  Other systems are often administered by add-hoc committees and this is obvious the lack of consistency in descriptions along with errors in the hierarchy trees. 

e.g. UNSPSC often has orphan and other invalid entries in the structure, along with miss-categorised entries.

NSV is unique in the following ways:-
 

  • the only item level system
  • over 500,000 entries next largest has around 25,000
  • professionally managed over a long period of time
  • consistent structure and descriptions

This makes the NSV data perfect training data for artificial intelligence applications, and cloudBuy and all the other partners would like to thank the Coding International team for maintaining there excellent data over the last 30 years.