Glossary
The terms we use, in plain words.
Operational software has its own vocabulary. These are the words that appear on this site and in our proposals.
- Operational software
- Software people use to run daily physical work: dispatching vehicles, maintaining machines, monitoring sites. Unlike office software, it has to keep working when the physical world misbehaves.
- Operations platform
- A shared foundation of an asset model, telemetry, alerts, workflows and integrations, on which the tools of one operation are built.
- Telemetry
- Measurements sent automatically from machines, vehicles or devices to a central system, such as position, temperature, engine hours or status.
- Telematics
- Telemetry from vehicles: position, routes, driving time, fuel. Usually supplied by a GPS tracking provider.
- Systems integration
- Making separate systems exchange data by agreed rules, so that the same fact is not typed twice and does not exist in two versions.
- Asset model
- The structured record of sites, machines, vehicles and their signals, with history and ownership. Everything else in an operational system refers to it.
- Work order
- A recorded task on an asset: what has to be done, by whom and by when, and what was actually done.
- Dispatch
- Assigning jobs to vehicles and drivers and following them until delivery.
- Idempotent ingestion
- Receiving data in such a way that the same message arriving twice has the same effect as arriving once. Needed because devices resend after a dropped link.
- Store and forward
- Keeping data on the device or gateway while the link is down and sending it when the link returns.
- Degraded mode
- A designed way for a system to keep the shift running when one of its parts or integrations is unavailable.
- Parallel run
- Running the new system beside the old one until their numbers match, before the old one is switched off.
- Cutover
- The moment an operation moves from the old system to the new one.
- SLA
- Service level agreement: a written commitment on availability and response times.
- Human in the loop
- A design in which an AI system proposes and a person approves before anything takes effect.
- Document extraction
- Reading a document such as an order, invoice or contract with a model and turning it into structured fields.
- AI co-worker (agent)
- A model given a role, tools and limits inside a system, which prepares or carries out tasks within defined permissions.
- API
- A defined way for one program to request data or actions from another.