What is the BMEcat standard?

The BMEcat standard consists of two parts: a header part (HEADER) and a transaction part (T_NEW_CATALOG, T_UPDATE_PRODUCTS or T_UPDATE_PRICES).

The header contains general information about the entire file, e.g. sender and recipient details. The transaction part contains details of all directories, among others:

• Features from classifications such as ETIM or ECLASS

• Custom features e.g. additional descriptions, keywords

• Images and additional documents e.g. instructions, certificates, technical drawings, videos, thumbnails

• References to other products e.g. accessories, alternative products, spare parts

• Pricing, ordering and additional fees e.g. tiered pricing, minimum quantity or order quantity range

• Logistics data e.g. packaging variants

• Tree structure of data, if there is a custom classification of products

BMEcat provides for two types of fields: required and optional.

Every three years or so, a new version of the vendor guidelines appears on the site, and currently the latest is ETIM BMEcat V5-0 of 2021. In addition to the three BMEcat transactions, ETIM uses its own fourth transaction, T_NEW_PRODUCTDATA. The new transaction makes it easy to provide the most important data for new products (only the most important data to import the product into the database without pricing and logistics data). Additional data will be provided in another step. As a result of omitting elements that are defined as mandatory in the BMEcat 2005 specification, the T_NEW_PRODUCTDATA transaction leads to a data file that is not 100% compliant with the BMEcat specification. This is a conscious decision by ETIM International to facilitate the transfer of product data at an early stage.

Depending on the country, supplier guidelines additionally: 

• change some optional features to required features,

• set descriptive text fields (standard in ETIM text is a checkbox),

• can introduce new features, e.g. in the Polish version the PKWiU code is required.

The Research and Development Department of the ECLASS e.V. Association has created an extension for BMEcat so that it can take full advantage of the potential of ECLASS classification. This version is called BMEcat 2005.1-advanced and is backward-compatible with BMEcat 2005, extending it with: 

• multilingualism (adding languages according to ISO 639-2:1998 and regions according to IETSs RFC 5646)

• tree structure (attaching additional element id and parent id)

• grouping elements into Aspects with ECLASS ADVANCED (containers have additional id, name and description).

When planning to implement the aforementioned product classifications, it is worth making sure that current or potentially new systems are able to receive / send them. For example, the SAP Ariba system provides adaptability to ETIM and ECLASS; as for BMEcat, it supports version 1.2, but no longer supports the latest version of BMEcat 2005. Thus, it is unable to support ECLASS version ADVANCED (BASIC only) or newer versions of ETIM (based on version 2005 for many years).

A more flexible tool, e.g. PimCore, allows not only to implement product classification, but also to customize the message to be able to take full advantage of ETIM / ECLASS. This is why more informed customers are inquiring about BMEcat in addition to product classification.