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Glossary 665
Partnership: a type of relationship in supply chains that
encourages relatively enduring cooperative agreements
for the joint accomplishment of business goals.
Parts commonality: see ‘Commonality’.
Parts family coding: the use of multi-digit codes to indicate
the relative similarity between different parts, often used
to determine the process route that a part takes through
a manufacturing operation.
Passive interaction technology: customer-processing technology
over which a customer has no, or very limited,
control, for example, cinemas and moving walkways.
PDCA cycle: stands for Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle, perhaps
the best known of all improvement cycle models.
P:D ratio: a ratio that contrasts the total length of time
customers have to wait between asking for a product
or service and receiving it (D) and the total throughput
time to produce the product or service (P).
Performance measurement: the activity of measuring
and assessing the various aspects of a process or whole
operation’s performance.
Performance objectives: the generic set of performance
indicators that can be used to set the objectives or judge
the performance of any type of operation, although there
are alternative lists proposed by different authorities,
the five performance objectives as used in this book are
quality, speed, dependability, flexibility and cost.
Performance standards: a defined level of performance
against which an operation’s actual performance is compared;
performance standard can be based on historical
performance, some arbitrary target performance, the
performance of competitors, etc.
Periodic review: an approach to making inventory decisions
that defines points in time for examining inventory
levels and then makes decisions accordingly, as opposed
to continuous review.
Perpetual inventory principle: a principle used in inventory
control that inventory records should be automatically
updated every time items are received or taken out of
stock.
Physical distribution management: organizing the integrated
movement and storage of materials.
Pipeline inventory: the inventory that exists because material
cannot be transported instantaneously.
Planning: the formalization of what is intended to happen
at some time in the future.
Plant-within-a-plant: a similar term to a cell layout but sometimes
used to indicate a larger clustering of resources, see
also ‘Shop-within-a-shop’.
Poka-yoke: Japanese term for fail-safeing.
Polar diagram: a diagram that uses axes, all of which
originate from the same central point, to represent different
aspects of operations performance.
Predetermined motion–time systems (PMTS): a work
measurement technique where standard elemental times
obtained from published tables are used to construct a
time estimate for a whole job.
Preliminary design: the initial design of a product or service
that sets out its main components and functions, but
does not include many specific details.
Prevention costs: those costs that are incurred in trying
to prevent quality problems and errors occurring, an
element within quality-related costs.
Preventive maintenance: an approach to maintenance management
that performs work on machines or facilities at
regular intervals in an attempt to prevent them breaking
down.
Principles of motion economy: a checklist used to develop
new methods in work study that is intended to eliminate
elements of the job, combine elements together, simplify
the activity or change the sequence of events so as to
improve efficiency.
Processes: an arrangement of resources that produces
some mixture of products and services.
Process capability: an arithmetic measure of the acceptability
of the variation of a process.
Process design: the overall configuration of a process that
determines the sequence of activities and the flow of
transformed resources between them.
Process layout: locating similar transforming resources
together so that different products or services with different
processing needs will take different routes through
the operation.
Process mapping: describing processes in terms of how
the activities within the process relate to each other (may
also be called ‘process blueprinting’ or ‘process analysis’).
Process mapping symbols: the symbols that are used to
classify different types of activity; they usually derive either
from scientific management or information-systems
flow-charting.
Process of strategy: the way in which strategies are
formulated.
Process outputs: the mixture of goods and services produced
by processes.
Process technology: the machines and devices that create
and/or deliver goods and services.
Process types: terms that are used to describe a particular
general approach to managing processes; in manufacturing
these are generally held to be project, jobbing,
batch, mass and continuous processes; in services they
are held to be professional services, service shops and
mass services.
Production flow analysis (PFA): a technique that examines
product requirements and process grouping simultaneously
to allocate tasks and machines to cells in cell layout.