The Common Procurement Vocabulary (CPV) has been developed by the European Union to facilitate the processing of invitation to tender published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) by means of a single classification system to describe the subject matter of public contracts.
This combination of digits is associated with a wording that describes the type of supplies, works or services defining the subject of the contract.
A Call for Tender is quite often described by more than one CPV Code, aiming to give a better and more detailed description of the object of the contract.
Commercial organisations promoting public contracts to their members or readers generally use CPV codes to identify business sectors likely to be interested in specific tenders, along with NUTS Codes which indicate the country and region within which the contract is to be performed.
The ninth digit, the so-called "control digit", verifies the previous eight ones, avoiding any possible error in the assignation of codes to the subject of public procurement Although the Supplementary Vocabulary is not always used, it can be added in certain cases to expand the description of the subject of a contract.