What is the Catalog
Your system of record for the products you trade, and the foundation every other Altana workflow reads from and writes back to.
The catalog is where Altana keeps your product data. Every product you make, source, or trade lives here, along with its trade attributes, its suppliers, and its place in your supply chain. When you classify a product, trace its origin, run a compliance check, or share a Product Passport, you are working with catalog data.
Everything else in Altana reads from the catalog and writes results back to it. Classify a product in a Trade Compliance workspace and the classification is stored in the catalog. Verify a value chain connection through a Product Passport and that connection updates the catalog. The catalog is the single source of truth that keeps your work consistent across every workflow.
What the catalog holds
Each product in the catalog carries three kinds of information:
- Identity — the product's name, description, and internal reference codes (SKUs).
- Trade attributes — Harmonized System (HS) code, country of origin, free trade agreement (FTA) qualification, and other values that drive duties and compliance determinations.
- Network links — the suppliers and facilities that produce the product, and the upstream value chain behind them.
Altana distinguishes between values you provided and values Altana inferred from the supply chain graph. Both appear in the catalog, labeled by source. See How Altana infers for how provenance is captured and surfaced.
The product hierarchy
A product in the catalog is not a single flat record. It has two tiers. The aggregate product is the product concept itself: its name, description, and the SKUs your organization uses to identify it in procurement systems and shipment records. Beneath the aggregate product sit one or more Altana products, one per manufacturing configuration. Compliance work happens at the Altana product level, because trade rules apply to where something was made and by whom, not just what it is called.
See Products, SKUs, and Altana products for a full explanation with a worked example.
Value chains
Every product in the catalog has a value chain: the network of suppliers and sub-suppliers that produced it. The catalog anchors that network. Altana builds it from the data you provide about your direct suppliers, then traces further upstream using the supply chain graph and verifies it through Product Passports.
See Value Chains for how the four layers of the value chain model work.
Lenses and workspaces
A workspace is a saved, scoped container for a specific body of work. When you create one, you define which products are in scope: all your North American products for a USMCA review, a specific product category for a forced labor screening, or your full catalog. That scope is saved, so you can return to the same workspace without resetting your context. Edits you make in a workspace write back to the catalog.
A lens is a view configuration applied within a workspace: the charts, filters, and columns framed for a particular workflow, such as classification or supplier status tracking. A single workspace can have multiple lens tabs open at once, each framing the same product scope in a different way. You would create a separate workspace when the product scope changes, not just the view.