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Glossary
ABC inventory control: an approach to inventory control
that classes inventory by its usage value and varies the
approach to managing it accordingly.
Acceptance sampling: a technique of quality sampling
that is used to decide whether to accept a whole batch
of products (and occasionally services) on the basis of a
sample; it is based on the operation’s willingness to risk
rejecting a ‘good’ batch and accepting a ‘bad’ batch.
Active interaction technology: customer processing
technology with which a customer interacts directly, for
example, cash machines.
Activity: as used in project management, it is an identifiable
and defined task, together with event activities form
network planning diagrams.
Aggregated planning and control: a term used to indicate
medium-term capacity planning that aggregates different
products and services together in order to get a broad
view of demand and capacity.
Agility: the ability of an operation to respond quickly and
at low cost as market requirements change.
Allowances: term used in work study to indicate the extra
time allowed for rest, relaxation and personal needs.
Andon: a light above a workstation that indicates its state,
whether working, waiting for work, broken down, etc.;
Andon lights may be used to stop the whole line when
one station stops.
Annual hours: a type of flexitime working that controls
the amount of time worked by individuals on an annual
rather than a shorter basis.
Anthropometric data: data that relate to people’s size,
shape and other physical abilities, used in the design of
jobs and physical facilities.
Anticipation inventory: inventory that is accumulated to cope
with expected future demand or interruptions in supply.
Appraisal costs: those costs associated with checking, monitoring
and controlling quality to see if problems or errors
have occurred, an element within quality-related costs.
Attributes of quality: measures of quality that can take one
of two states, for example, right or wrong, works or does
not work, etc.
Auto-ID: abbreviation for automated identification; a device
incorporating a memory chip into which is embedded
a unique 95-bits-long electronic product code (ePC)
that uniquely identifies an individual part or product,
it enables the exact state and location of a part or component
to be tracked through its life.
Automated guided vehicles (AGVs): small, independently
powered vehicles that move material to and from valueadding
operations.
Back-office: the low-visibility part of an operation.
Backward scheduling: starting jobs at a time when they
should be finished exactly when they are due, as opposed
to forward scheduling.
Balancing loss: the quantification of the lack of balance in
a production line, defined as the percentage of time not
used for productive purposes with the total time invested
in making a product.
Bar code: a unique product code that enables a part or product
type to be identified when read by a bar-code scanner.
Basic time: the time taken to do a job without any extra
allowances for recovery.
Batch processes: processes that treat batches of products
together, and where each batch has its own process route.
Bath-tub curve: a curve that describes the failure probabilty
of a product, service or process that indicates
relatively high probabilities of failure at the beginning
and at the end of the life cycle.
Behavioural job design: an approach to job design that
takes into account individuals’ desire to fulfil their needs
for self-esteem and personal development.
Benchmarking: the activity of comparing methods and/or
performance with other processes in order to learn from
them and/or assess performance.
Bill of materials (BOM): a list of the component parts
required to make up the total package for a product or
service together with information regarding their level in
the product or component structure and the quantities
of each component required.
Blueprinting: a term often used in service design to mean
process mapping.
Bottleneck: the capacity-constraining stage in a process; it
governs the output of the whole process.
Bottom-up: the influence of operational experience on
operations decisions.
Brainstorming: an improvement technique where small
groups of people put forward ideas in a creative free-form
manner.
Break-even analysis: the technique of comparing revenues
and costs at increasing levels of output in order to establish
the point at which revenue exceeds cost, that is the
point at which it ‘breaks even’.