Glossary

Job-shop and ERP vocabulary as Forge uses it. Where a term has a Forge-specific twist, that's called out.

The shop

Job — the central unit of work: making a thing for a customer. Depending on the shop, the same record is called a work order, a project or a job card. In Forge that name is admin configuration, not a code change — see terminology in Capability Gating.

Work order (WO) — the released, schedulable instruction to produce a quantity of a part. "Release" is the moment a planned job becomes real work the floor can pick up.

Operation / routing — a routing is the ordered list of operations (cut, mill, deburr, inspect) a part goes through. Each operation names a work center and a standard time.

Work center — a machine, cell or bench that work is scheduled against and labour is booked to.

Traveler / job card — the paper or on-screen document that follows the job through the shop, carrying the routing and collecting sign-offs.

Shop floor / kiosk — the shared-screen surface where workers clock in and out of jobs, usually with a badge or RFID tap rather than a password. See the tiered authentication table in Architecture.

WIP — work in progress: jobs started but not finished. Both a physical reality and an inventory valuation.

Parts and materials

BOM (bill of materials) — the list of components and quantities that go into a part. Multi-level when a component has its own BOM.

Revision — a versioned state of a part's definition. Shops care enormously about which revision a job was built to.

Lot / serial — traceability granularity. A lot is a batch treated as one traceable unit; a serial identifies one individual item. Regulated work usually requires one or both.

UOM (unit of measure) — and, more painfully, conversions between them: buy in sheets, stock in pounds, issue in inches.

Cycle count — auditing on-hand stock a slice at a time in normal operation, rather than shutting down for a full physical inventory.

Money

Quote-to-cash — the whole commercial arc: lead → estimate → quote → sales order → job → shipment → invoice → payment. Forge's scope statement in one phrase.

Estimate vs quote — an estimate is a non-binding ballpark, usually a single number. A quote is line-itemised and binding once accepted.

Procure-to-pay (P2P) — the purchasing arc: requisition → RFQ → purchase order → receipt → vendor bill → payment.

RFQ — request for quote, sent to vendors; the responses are compared and one is awarded, generating a PO.

Blanket PO — a standing purchase order with scheduled releases against it, rather than one PO per delivery.

GRNI — goods received, not invoiced: the accrual holding the value of stock you've received but haven't been billed for yet.

COGS — cost of goods sold. Recognised when revenue is, which is why shipment and invoicing post accounting entries.

AR / AP — accounts receivable (what customers owe you) and accounts payable (what you owe vendors).

GL / general ledger — the double-entry book of record. In Forge it is a capability that stays off until opening balances are loaded; see Accounting Modes.

Opening balances / conversion journal — the posted entry that carries your existing books into a new ledger. Without it a ledger starts from zero and is wrong.

Period close — freezing an accounting period so its entries can no longer change.

Standard costing — costing parts at a planned rate and tracking variances against it, rather than recomputing actual cost per unit.

Overhead — indirect cost applied to production, in Forge attached to cost centers rather than to BOM lines.

Quality

NCR — non-conformance report: the record that something didn't meet spec.

CAPA — corrective and preventive action: the follow-up that stops it happening again.

ECO — engineering change order: a controlled change to a part's definition.

SPC — statistical process control: charting measurements over time to catch drift before it becomes scrap.

PPAP / FMEA — production part approval process and failure modes and effects analysis: the formal packets automotive and aerospace customers require.

Gage — a measuring instrument, with its own calibration schedule and records.

Planning

MRP — material requirements planning: exploding demand through BOMs and lead times to say what to buy and make, and when.

MPS — master production schedule: the higher-level plan MRP works from.

Capacity / load — how much work is scheduled against a work center versus how much it can absorb.

Dispatch list — the ordered list of what a work center should run next.

OEE — overall equipment effectiveness: availability × performance × quality, the standard machine-utilisation metric.

Forge-specific

Capability — a named feature flag, CAP-{AREA}-{NAME}, that decides whether a feature exists for this install. See Capability Gating.

Preset — a named bundle of capabilities matching a shop shape, recommended by the discovery wizard.

Track type — the configurable kanban lane structure a job moves through.

Integrated vs standalone mode — whether an external accounting provider owns the books. Marked ⚡ throughout the specs; see Accounting Modes.

Ratchet — the enforcement pattern for coding standards: hard rules fail, legacy debt is baselined per file and may only shrink. See Contributing.