Manufacturing operations
glossary

These are working definitions, written the way we explain them on a shop floor rather than the way a standards document would. Each one is self-contained, so you can read a single entry without the rest.

4M analysis

A method of classifying the cause of a defect into one of four categories: Man, Machine, Method and Material. Recording the 4M cause at the moment a defect is logged is what later allows losses to be grouped by cause rather than only by part or by line.

See TML

Availability guard

A rule that stops one customer delivery from consuming stock an earlier delivery still needs. Before allocating stock to today's picking list, the system totals the full ordered quantity of every live list with an earlier delivery date and refuses the allocation if the remaining free stock would fall below it. The earlier list's whole requirement is reserved, not just the part it has yet to prepare.

See QC-WMS

Baseline plan

The version of a production plan frozen at the moment it was agreed, kept so that later execution can be compared against it. Without a baseline a plan quietly becomes whatever happened, and deviation can no longer be measured.

See ProdSYNC

Inventory session

A stock count run against a snapshot rather than against live stock. The session records expected quantities when it opens, operators count by scanning, and closing the session separates the results into what matched, what differed in quantity, what was expected but never found, and what was found but not expected.

See QC-WMS

Designator

The identifier of a single component's position on a printed circuit board, such as R1, C5 or U3. Recording the designator with a defect is what makes it possible to see that the same position fails repeatedly across a production run.

See TML

Electronic batch record

The digital equivalent of the paper batch record that documents how a specific production batch was made. It holds the materials, equipment, steps, checks and signatures for that batch, and in regulated industries it is the document an auditor asks for first.

See BatchTrace

GMP

Good Manufacturing Practice: the set of regulations governing how medicines, food and other regulated products must be produced and documented. Its practical effect on software is that records must be attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original and accurate, and that changes must never quietly overwrite what came before.

See BatchTrace

Gross quantity vs available quantity

Gross quantity is everything physically on a pallet. Available quantity is gross minus whatever has already been allocated to a delivery. Keeping the two apart is what allows a system to answer both what you have and what you can still promise, and confusing them is the usual cause of a stock report disagreeing with the shelf.

See QC-WMS

Jidoka

The Lean principle of building in the ability to detect an abnormality and stop, so a defect is contained rather than passed downstream. Applied to line supply, it means an anomaly in replenishment halts the flow instead of quietly starving the line later.

See Jidoka Kanban

Kanban

A pull-based replenishment method where consumption at the point of use triggers resupply, rather than material being pushed to the line on a forecast. The signal was historically a physical card; digitally it is a consumption event that raises a replenishment request.

See Jidoka Kanban

Master production schedule

The plan that says which products will be built, in what quantity, on which line and in which period. It sits between demand and the shop floor, and its quality is judged by whether the floor can actually execute it against real capacity and material constraints.

See MPS

MTBF

Mean Time Between Failures: the average running time between one breakdown of a machine and the next. It is used to judge whether equipment reliability is improving, and it is only meaningful when failures and running hours are both recorded consistently.

See ActON

Picking list

One customer delivery, treated as a single unit of work: everything going to one destination on one date. A delivery plan imported from the customer becomes one picking list per destination and date, and the list then moves through preparation, validation and shipping as a whole.

See QC-WMS

Poka-yoke

A mistake-proofing design that makes an error physically difficult or impossible rather than relying on the operator to be careful. In software this usually appears as a validation that refuses an action, for example requiring a scanned label to match the product before a shipment can be confirmed.

See TML

Preventive maintenance

Maintenance performed on a schedule, before a failure occurs, rather than in response to a breakdown. A preventive plan is usually derived from the equipment manufacturer's manual and expressed as recurring tasks tied to calendar time or running hours.

See ActON

Put-away

The step of moving a finished pallet from the working area into a storage location, either a numbered shelf slot or a floor bin. Automated put-away chooses the location itself, typically preferring a bin that already holds the same part over an empty one, so a part stays grouped.

See QC-WMS

Rework

Repairing a defective product so it can re-enter the flow instead of being scrapped. Rework is normally followed by a sort step that splits the batch into pieces that now pass and pieces that still do not.

See TML

RFQ (freight)

Request for Quotation: the process of asking multiple carriers to price the same transport lane so the offers can be compared on equal terms. Run systematically it produces a defensible carrier choice and a benchmark; run ad hoc by email it produces neither.

See QCLOT

RO e-Transport

The Romanian national system requiring high-risk goods movements to be declared to the tax authority before transport begins, in exchange for a UIT code that must accompany the shipment. Non-declaration carries fines, so the declaration usually has to be part of the dispatch process rather than an afterthought.

See QCLOT

Scrap

Material declared unrecoverable and written off. Scrap is a financial event as much as a physical one, which is why a controlled process usually separates declaring it, confirming it and validating it between different roles rather than letting one person write material off alone.

See TML

SLA

Service Level Agreement: an agreed deadline for responding to or resolving a request, usually varying by priority. In maintenance, an SLA turns a request into something measurable, because a job either was or was not closed within the time its priority allowed.

See ActON

Truck shadow

The staging area where goods wait after being prepared and before being loaded. Stock in truck shadow is physically present in the warehouse but already promised to a delivery, so it is deliberately excluded from available stock.

See QC-WMS