Glossary
The terms, defined the way plants use them
Most plant data arguments are definition arguments in disguise. These are the definitions we work from.
- OEE Overall Equipment Effectiveness
- Availability × Performance × Quality, expressed as a percentage of the theoretical best output for a defined window. Comparable across sites only when available time, planned downtime and changeover treatment are defined identically. → OEE dashboard
- MES / MOM Manufacturing Execution System / Manufacturing Operations Management
- The system that executes and records production against orders: routing, work-in-progress, labour, downtime and genealogy. It knows what happened on the floor; the ERP knows what was promised. → ERP and MES integration
- ERP Enterprise Resource Planning
- The commercial system of record for orders, materials, costs and dates. Reality on the floor drifts from ERP continuously, which is why answers that use only one of the two are usually wrong.
- Unified namespace A single real-time data structure for the plant
- An event-driven architecture where every system publishes to and subscribes from one hierarchical namespace, usually over MQTT, instead of point-to-point integrations.
- Industrial DataOps Operational practice for industrial data feeds
- Applying versioning, testing, monitoring and ownership to what moves plant data between systems, so a broken feed is detected before someone makes a decision on it.
- Golden batch The reference run
- The parameter profile of the best-performing historical run for a product, used as the comparison baseline for detecting drift in current production.
- MTBF / MTTR Mean time between failures / mean time to repair
- Reliability and recovery measures per asset. Useful only when failure events and repair windows are coded consistently across the CMMS and the machine layer.
- Days of cover How long current supply lasts against real demand
- On-hand plus confirmed inbound divided by expected consumption rate. The most actionable shortage measure because it converts stock levels into time.
- Write-back Pushing an action into the source system
- Creating or updating a record — a work order, a revised date, an expedite request — in the system that owns it, from the intelligence layer, with an audit trail. → What a Connection is allowed to do
- Historian Time-series store for process data
- A database optimised for high-frequency tag data from PLCs and sensors. Excellent at storing signals, poor at relating them to orders, products or customers.
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