A manufacturing glossary, in four domains.

AFNOR NF E60-182 is the French standard that defines the time categories of a production resource and the rates computed from them, including the TRS, the French equivalent of OEE.

Andon is a visual signal that shows the state of a line and calls for help when something goes wrong: originally a cord or a light, now often a screen on the shop floor.

The asset register is the list of every piece of equipment the maintenance team looks after, organised as a hierarchy from site to line to machine to component.

Availability is the time a machine actually ran as a share of the time it was required to run.

A batch record is the documented history of one batch or lot: the instructions followed, the materials used, the checks made, the deviations and who signed for each step.

A bill of materials lists the components, raw materials and quantities needed to make one unit of a product, often as a tree of sub-assemblies.

The bottleneck is the resource whose capacity limits the output of the whole line.

A changeover is the time between the last good unit of one product and the first good unit of the next on the same equipment.

A Computerised Maintenance Management System is the application a maintenance team plans and records its work in: requests, work orders, preventive plans, the equipment register and spare parts.

Condition-based maintenance triggers work when a measured indicator crosses a threshold: vibration, temperature, oil analysis, a wear measurement.

Corrective maintenance is work done to restore equipment after it has failed or been found faulty.

Criticality ranks equipment by the consequence of its failure: on safety, on the environment, on production and on cost.

A cyber-physical system is equipment in which physical processes and software are tightly linked: sensors measure, software decides and actuators act, in a loop.

A data historian is a database built to store the values of many tags over time, efficiently and in order, and to retrieve them by tag and time range.

The digital thread is the connected record of a product across its life: design, planning, production, quality, delivery and service, linked so that any point can be traced to the others.

A digital twin is a software model of a physical asset, line or process, kept in step with the real one by data from it, and used to monitor, simulate or optimise it.

Enterprise Asset Management covers the whole life of physical assets across an organisation: acquisition, maintenance, performance, cost and disposal, often across many sites.

Edge computing processes data close to where it is produced, on or near the machines, rather than sending everything to a central server or a cloud.

Enterprise Resource Planning software runs the business side of a company: orders, purchasing, inventory, planning, costing and accounting, in one system of record.

First pass yield is the share of units that pass through a process correctly the first time, without rework or repair.

Gemba is the place where the work is done, on a plant the production floor.

Genealogy is the record linking a produced lot to the lots of material and components that went into it, the equipment that made it and the period it ran in.

A human-machine interface is the screen or panel through which an operator monitors and controls a machine or process.

Horizontal integration connects systems at the same level across a value chain: production steps with each other, one plant with another, a plant with its suppliers and customers.

HTTP push is a device or system sending data to a receiving server by HTTP request whenever there is something to report, rather than waiting to be asked.

The ideal cycle time is the shortest time in which a machine can produce one unit of a given product under good conditions.

The Industrial Internet of Things is the network of sensors, controllers and machines in industry that send data to other systems.

Industry 4.0 is the name for connecting machines, systems and people in manufacturing so that production data flows between them and decisions are taken on it.

ISA-95 is the international standard for integrating enterprise systems with manufacturing control systems.

IT/OT convergence is the joining of information technology, the business systems and networks, with operational technology, the controllers and systems that run physical equipment.

Kaizen is the practice of continuous, incremental improvement, carried out by the people who do the work.

Lean manufacturing is a way of running production that focuses on delivering what the customer values with the least waste of time, material and effort.

Lockout/tagout is the safety procedure that isolates equipment from its energy sources and keeps it isolated while it is being worked on.

The maintenance backlog is the work that has been approved but not yet done, usually expressed in labour hours or in weeks of the team’s capacity.

A maintenance work order is the authorised, planned job to carry out maintenance on a piece of equipment: what is to be done, by whom, with which parts and by when.

A Manufacturing Execution System records and directs what happens on the production floor: which order runs on which machine, what the machine did, what was produced and what went wrong.

A micro-stop is a stop short enough that it is cleared on the spot and rarely recorded by hand: a jam, a misfeed, a sensor that needs a reset.

Modbus is a simple, long-established protocol for reading and writing registers in industrial devices, over a serial line (RTU) or Ethernet (TCP).

MQTT is a lightweight messaging protocol in which devices publish messages to named topics on a broker and other systems subscribe to the topics they need.

Mean time between failures is the operating time of a piece of equipment divided by the number of failures over the same period.

Mean time to repair is the total time spent restoring equipment after its failures, divided by the number of those failures.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness is the share of planned production time that produced good parts at full speed.

OPC UA is an open, platform-independent standard for exchanging industrial data securely, with information models that describe what each value means as well as its value.

A paperless shop floor replaces paper instructions, checklists, forms and logs on the production floor with electronic ones, completed at terminals and stored with the production record.

PDCA is a four-step improvement cycle: plan a change, do it on a small scale, check the result against what was expected, and act by adopting, adjusting or abandoning it.

Performance is what a machine produced while running, as a share of what it would have produced at its ideal rate in the same time.

A programmable logic controller is the industrial computer that runs a machine: it reads its inputs, executes the control program in a fast cycle and drives its outputs.

PM compliance is the share of scheduled preventive work orders completed within their allowed window over a period.

Predictive maintenance forecasts when equipment is likely to fail, from trends in condition data and failure history, and schedules work just before.

Preventive maintenance is work done on a schedule to reduce the chance of failure: inspections, lubrication, adjustments and part replacements.

A protocol gateway is a device or piece of software that reads data in one protocol and passes it on in another, such as from Modbus registers or a proprietary controller to MQTT.

Publish and subscribe is a messaging pattern in which senders publish messages to a topic without knowing who will receive them, and receivers subscribe to the topics they want.

The quality rate is the number of good units as a share of all units produced.

Real-time production monitoring shows the state and output of equipment as production runs, from data read automatically, rather than in a report after the shift.

The reorder point is the stock level at which a part should be ordered again, set so that the new stock arrives before the old runs out.

Root cause analysis is a structured search for the underlying reason a failure occurred, so that the fix prevents it from recurring rather than just repairing the symptom.

A routing is the ordered list of operations a product goes through, with the resource each one uses and the time it is expected to take.

SCADA is software that supervises and controls processes across many machines or a whole site: it collects values from controllers, displays them, raises alarms and lets operators issue commands.

Scrap is output that cannot be used and is discarded or recycled.

A sensor converts a physical quantity into a signal: presence, position, temperature, pressure, vibration, flow.

A shift report summarises what a production team made during its shift, what stopped, what was rejected and what the next team needs to know.

S7 is the communication protocol of Siemens SIMATIC S7 controllers, used to read and write their data blocks over Ethernet.

A smart factory is a plant where equipment and systems share data continuously, so the state of production is known as it happens and can be acted on without waiting for a report.

Spare parts are the components held in stock to repair or maintain equipment, from consumables to critical spares that are expensive and slow to source.

A stop reason is the cause recorded against a period when a machine was not producing, chosen from a list the plant maintains.

A tag is a named data point in an industrial system: one value, such as a temperature, a state or a counter, with its name, type and source address.

Takt time is the available production time divided by the customer demand over the same period.

TEEP measures good output against all calendar time, not just planned production time.

Time-series data is a sequence of values recorded with their timestamps, such as a machine’s state, speed or temperature over a shift.

Total Productive Maintenance is a method that involves operators in the routine care of their own equipment, alongside the maintenance team, with the aim of eliminating breakdowns, short stops and defects.

Traceability is the ability to follow a product through its history in both directions: forward from a suspect material to every lot it went into, and backward from a finished unit to everything that made it.

A unified namespace is an architecture in which every system publishes its current data to one shared, hierarchically named structure, usually on an MQTT broker, and every other system reads from it.

Vertical integration connects the levels of a plant’s systems, from sensors and controllers up through supervision and the MES to the ERP, so that information passes between them without being re-entered.

Work in progress is material that has entered production and not yet been finished: parts between operations, in buffers or waiting for a resource.

A work order is the instruction to make a stated quantity of one product, by a stated date, following a given routing.

A work request is a report that something needs maintenance attention, raised by whoever noticed it: an operator, a supervisor, a technician.