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AAR: Anticipated Arrival Record

ABB: Activity Based Budgeting

ABC: Activity Based Costing - A financial methodology that attempts to create a truer measure of the cost and performance of activities, resources and the things that consume them. ABC recognizes the causal relationships of cost drivers to activities.
: Can also be the ABC classification system of items in decreasing order of annual sales value (price x projected volume). Usually displays the Pareto 80:20 rule in that 80% of inventory value is held in 20% of the materials. It can be that A, B and C class materials are planned differently and perhaps as runners, repeater and strangers.


ABCD: The ABCD Checklist is part of the benchmarking of a businesses planning and control processes that would lead to the awarding of the Class A award.

ABM: Activity Based Management - a discipline that focuses on the management of activities as the route to improving the value received by the customer and the profit achieved by providing this value. Draws on ABC as a major source of information.

ABO: Adaptive Business Operations

ABP: Asset Based Provider (Also Asset Based Planning)
ACD: Automated Call Distribution - a feature of Customer Interaction Centre phone switches that routes calls by rules such as next available employee, skill-set etc.

ADC: Automated Data Collection (or Capture) (Thanks to Stephen Butler).

ADF: Abnormal Demand Filter - a filter that automatically detects customer orders that are abnormally large and identifies them as outside of normal forecast demand consumption.

ADR: Initials of French phrase meaning “International Agreement Concerning the Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road" (Related to ADN, ADNR).

ADP: Automatic Data Processing (now were going back a bit!)

ADU: Average Daily Usage

AETR: European Agreement concerning the Work of Crews of Vehicles engaged in International Road Transport.

AFH: FMCG goods used away from the home i.e. hotels, hospitals, industrial settings etc.

AFRA: Average Freight Rate Assessment (Also Average Freight Rate Agreement)

AFS: Apparel and Footwear Solution (as in SAP AFS)

AGV: Automatically (or Automated) Guided Vehicle - computer controlled vehicle usually moving materials, tools and products around warehouses and production shop floors.


AIAG: Automotive Industry Action Group.

AIM: Asset Information Management - related to plant lifecycle management (also Aggregate Inventory Management)

ALC: Actual Landed Cost - as opposed to Estimated Landed Cost (ELC). The true cost of goods including customs, logistics, transport costs etc.

AMB: Average Monthly Billing

ANA: Article Numbering Association - now known as e-Centre. The coordinating body in the UK for article numbering using the EAN, ITF-14 and EAN-128 standards.

ANSI: American National Standards Institute

ANX: Automotive Network Exchange.

AP: Accounts Payable - The Bought or Purchase Ledger

API: Application Programming Interface - allows third party software to communicate with packaged software.

APICS: American Production and Inventory Control Society (now Educational Society for Resource Management. The British version of this organisation is the Institute of Operations Management (IOM); previously called BPICS.


APM: Application Performance Management

APO: Advanced Planning and Optimization (as in the SAP APO module)

APQP: Advanced Product Quality Planning

APS: Advanced Planning Systems or Advanced Planning and Scheduling - essentially the same as a Supply Chain Planning (SCP) product. The age of the Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) product has dawned because computing power has advanced to the stage that we can now economically mathematically model the real world where the supply of components and products is constrained by complex constraints such as supplier capacity, sequences, profiles and relationships.

AR: Accounts Receivable - The Sales Ledger.

ARL: Automated Reverse Logistics

ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Exchange - code used by most computers to represent letters and numbers.

ASCN: Adaptive Supply Chain Network

ASN: Advance Shipping Notification - usually an EDI document sent by the supplier as goods are shipped to a customer to notify the customer of exactly what should be in the shipment.


ASP: Application Service Provider - a supplier who provides computer applications and packages across a network for use by customers.

ASR: Automated Storage and Retrieval (also AS&RS or AS/RS) - Automated storage of items and retrieval of items from stock usually consisting of four basic components; storage areas, storage and retrieval machines, conveying devices and control computers.

ATO: Assemble To Order - cars (automobiles) are mostly assembled to order, requirements for engine size, colour, trim, A/C and stereo are assembled to a specific sales order. This method is associated with MTF (see below) as a forecast would still be needed to ensure the assembly components were available.


ATP: Available To Promise - The amount of stock that can be promised to a customer based on at least a knowledge of the on-hand stock balance, forecast, the Master Production Schedule (MPS) quantity and the booked customer orders into the future.

ATS: Available To Sell - Total quantity of goods committed to the pipeline for a ship to or selling location. This includes the current inventory at a location and any open purchase orders.

AUV: Annual Usage Value

AQL: Acceptable Quality Levels

AWB: Airway Bill