Glossary

The words this industry uses

The terms you meet while comparing maintenance and production systems, defined plainly. Where the term describes something we do, the entry links to the page about it.

API key: A secret that identifies a system calling an interface, carrying its own permissions so it can do only what it is meant to do.Integrations
Audit trail: The complete record of who did what and when, kept as the work happens rather than written up afterwards.Events
Checklist: The list of steps a job has to go through, ticked off one by one, sometimes with a photo required before the job can be closed.Events
CMMS: Computerised maintenance management system: software that holds the asset register, the work orders and the maintenance history in one place, so repairs and inspections stop living in spreadsheets.CMMS
Condition-based maintenance: Work triggered by a measured condition rather than by a date: vibration above a limit, a temperature that keeps climbing, a pressure that drops.Condition monitoring
Downtime count: How many times an asset stopped in a period, as distinct from how long it stood. Many short stops and one long one call for different fixes.Downtime analysis
EAM: Enterprise asset management: the wider view of an asset over its whole life, from purchase and commissioning through maintenance to disposal, with the costs attached at every stage.Platform
Electrical revision: A statutory electrical safety inspection, recorded with its result, its date and a printable protocol for whoever asks to see it.Schedules
Goods receipt: Booking in what a supplier actually delivered, including partial deliveries and the items that had to be rejected and sent back.Orders
MES: Manufacturing execution system: software that follows production while it runs, from what is being made on which line to why a line stopped.MES
Minimum stock threshold: The quantity below which a part has to be reordered. Crossing it is what turns a shelf into a purchase request.Inventory
MIT: Mean idle time: the average time a job sat waiting before anyone worked on it. High idle time points at dispatching rather than at the repairs themselves.Dashboard
MTBF: Mean time between failures: the average time an asset runs between one failure and the next. Rising MTBF means fewer stoppages, whatever the repairs cost.Devices
MTTR: Mean time to recovery: the average time it takes to get an asset running again after a failure. It measures the repair, not how often the failure happens.Dashboard
MWT: Mean work time: the average time actually spent working on jobs, as opposed to the time those jobs spent waiting for someone.Dashboard
Nonconformance report (NCR): The controlled record of one nonconformity: what deviated from which requirement, what was done with the affected item, why it happened and what was done so it does not happen again.NCR
OEE: Overall equipment effectiveness: availability multiplied by performance multiplied by quality, expressed as one figure for a line, a shift or a machine.MES
Pareto analysis: Ranking causes by how often or how expensively they occur, with a cumulative curve, so the few that account for most of the loss stand out from the rest.Downtime analysis
Predictive maintenance: Using recorded history and readings to estimate when a machine is likely to fail, so the work happens shortly before it does rather than long before or just after.Devices
Preventive maintenance: Work planned by time or by usage rather than by failure: a service every three months or every five hundred hours, whether anything looks wrong or not.Preventive maintenance
Purchase request: An internal ask to buy something, raised before an order exists, so approval happens before any money is committed.Purchase approval
QR code: A printed code on an asset or a shelf that opens the right record when someone scans it with a phone camera.Devices
RFID: Radio-frequency identification: tags read by radio rather than by sight, used where scanning each item with a camera would be too slow.Inventory
Root cause: The condition that actually produced a failure, as opposed to the symptom that was noticed first. Fixing the symptom brings the same stoppage back.Downtime analysis
Serial-number tracking: Following individual items rather than quantities, so each piece has its own identity and history from goods receipt to the machine it ended up in.Part traceability
Supplier scoring: Rating suppliers on agreed criteria so the choice of supplier rests on a record rather than on who remembers the last bad delivery.Supplier scoring
Tracked value: A reading kept on an asset over time, such as a temperature, a pressure or an hour count, with its history and the limits that make it interesting.Rules
Uptime: The total time an asset was available and running over a chosen period, the counterpart of the time it stood.Devices
Webhook: An HTTP call one system makes to another when something happens, so a change here becomes a request there without anyone asking repeatedly.Integrations
WMS: Warehouse management system: software that tracks what is in stock, where it sits and every movement in and out. In maintenance it usually means the spare-parts store.WMS
Work order: The record of one job: what is to be done, on which asset, by whom and by when, and what it cost once it was finished.Events

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The words this industry uses

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