Reference · Glossary

The supply chain, defined.

45 working definitions — SCOR DS processes, the metrics that matter, and the vocabulary of decision intelligence. Written to be quoted whole: each entry stands alone.

A

#Agentic AI: AI systems that pursue goals through multi-step action — reading systems, weighing options, and executing changes — rather than only answering questions. In supply chains, agentic AI is useful exactly where decisions recur: the same trade-off, new telemetry, every day.
#AllocationOrder: The decision of which orders receive available supply when commitments exceed it. Allocation strategies (protect contracts, pro-rata, first-in-first-out, protect margin) ship the same units with very different penalty and relationship outcomes.
#ASCM: The Association for Supply Chain Management — the professional body that stewards the SCOR model (the Supply Chain Council, which endorsed SCOR, is now part of ASCM). ASCM publishes the SCOR Digital Standard as an open-access framework.
#Available-to-Promise (ATP)Order: What you can still promise: the supply left over once existing commitments are subtracted from inventory and scheduled receipts. When committed demand exceeds ATP, the question is no longer how much ships — it is who ships and who waits.

B

#BackorderOrder: An order (or order line) accepted but not yet fulfillable from current supply, carried forward with a new promise date. A disciplined backorder is promised against confirmed inbound recovery, not against hope.

C

#Circular supply chainReturn: A supply chain designed so products, components, and materials re-enter productive use — through repair, refurbishment, remanufacture, or recycling — instead of exiting as waste. SCOR DS connects the Return process explicitly to circular activities.
#Control band: A pre-agreed range within which a measure is allowed to vary before anyone acts. Control bands turn monitoring into decisions: inside the band is noise, outside the band is a trigger. The discipline is setting the band before the deviation, not after.
#Corrective action request (CAR)Source: A formal request that a supplier investigate a performance failure, identify the root cause, and document the fix, with evidence. Distinct from commercial remedies such as penalties or award shifts: a CAR addresses the underlying problem rather than repricing its consequences.

D

#Decision intelligence: The engineering discipline of improving decisions — not just predictions — by connecting data, models, and judgment to a specific recurring choice, its alternatives, and its outcomes. Distinct from analytics: the output is a committed action, not a chart.
#Demand planningPlan: The process of estimating future demand and maintaining that estimate as evidence arrives. Its quality is measured less by any single forecast than by how quickly persistent error is noticed and re-planned.
#Demonstrated capacityTransform: What a resource has actually produced under real conditions, as opposed to nameplate capacity — what it could theoretically produce. Schedules built on nameplate numbers fail predictably; demonstrated capacity is the honest planning basis.
#DispositionReturn: The decision of what happens to a returned or nonconforming unit: restock, repair, refurbish, harvest for parts, or scrap. Dispositioning per unit — by condition, entitlement, and economics — is the difference between a returns cost center and a recovery operation.

E

#Expedite: Paying a premium — freight, overtime, changeover — to compress a lead time after the fact. Expediting is neither good nor bad; it is a price, and the discipline is comparing it against the exposure it removes before spending it.

F

#Fill rateReliability (RL): The share of demand served from available supply in a period, measured in units, order lines, or complete orders — the basis must be stated for the number to be comparable. During a shortfall, allocation determines how misses are distributed across customers more than it moves the aggregate rate.
#Forecast biasPlan: The tendency of forecast error to lean in one direction — consistently over or under. Bias is more dangerous than error: random misses wash out, but persistent under-forecasting quietly consumes buffers until something breaks.
#FulfillFulfill: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes: executing customer orders and services — scheduling delivery, picking, packing, shipping, installation and commissioning, and invoicing. Together with Order it replaces classic SCOR's Deliver.

J

#Judgment LayerA2go term: A2go's term for the coordination layer that governs its decision agents: it sets the constraint envelope, sequences decision loops, and archives every commitment with its rationale. In SCOR DS terms, an implementation of the Level-0 Orchestrate process.

L

#Lead time: The elapsed time between triggering a supply activity and its completion — order to receipt, release to finish. Averages get the attention; variance does the damage.
#Lead-time varianceSource: The spread of actual lead times around their average. Buffers are sized against variance, not means — a supplier whose lead time is long but stable is easier to plan around than one who is fast on average and unpredictable.
#LTL / FTLFulfill: Less-than-truckload and full-truckload freight. Consolidating several LTL departures into one FTL trades some schedule flexibility for meaningfully lower cost per unit — a standing lever when transportation markets tighten.

M

#MAPEPlan: Mean absolute percentage error — a standard measure of forecast accuracy: the average size of forecast misses relative to actuals. Useful with two cautions: it says nothing about direction (see forecast bias) and behaves badly near zero-demand items.

O

#On-time-in-full (OTIF)Reliability (RL): A delivery-reliability measure: the share of orders delivered complete and by the committed date. Frequently contractual — Tier-1 customer agreements attach penalty clauses to OTIF floors, which is why allocation decisions must read the customer master, not just the order book.
#OrchestrateOrchestrate: SCOR DS's Level-0 process: the activities that connect the supply chain externally to suppliers and customers and internally to its stakeholders — strategy, business rules, network design, data and analytics, risk, ESG, and performance management. The layer where the other six processes are integrated and enabled.
#OrderOrder: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes, new in the Digital Standard: the activities associated with the customer purchase of products and services — quoting, capture, promising, allocation, and order management. Split out of classic SCOR's Deliver.

P

#Perfect order fulfillmentReliability (RL): The strictest reliability metric: an order counts only if delivered in full, on time to commitment, with accurate documentation, in perfect condition — every component must pass. In SCOR DS it is a Level-1 reliability metric (Perfect Customer Order Fulfillment, RL.1.1) whose components serve as its diagnostics.
#Performance attribute: In SCOR, a strategic grouping of metrics — the attribute itself is not measured; it names the direction (be more reliable, more responsive, more agile) that its metrics quantify. SCOR DS defines eight: reliability, responsiveness, agility, cost, profit, asset management, environmental, and social.
#PlanPlan: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes: developing the road maps to operate the supply chain — determining requirements, assessing resources, balancing the two, and identifying actions to close gaps. Plans are made for each of the other execution processes and reconciled with one another.
#Promise dateOrder: The date committed to a customer for delivery. A defensible promise is derived from where supply actually lands — confirmed receipts, vessel ETAs, production completion — so it is a commitment the network can keep rather than a habit the order desk repeats.

R

#Re-promiseOrder: A revised delivery commitment issued when the original promise can no longer be met. Done well it is proactive — set against confirmed recovery supply, before the customer discovers the miss. A disciplined re-promise costs relationship capital once; a silent miss costs it with interest.
#ReturnReturn: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes: the reverse flow of goods and services from the customer back through the network — receiving, diagnosing condition, evaluating entitlement, and dispositioning into Transform or other circular activities.
#Reverse logisticsReturn: The physical movement half of the Return process: transporting, receiving, and staging goods flowing against the forward direction of the chain. Reverse flows have forward economics — lanes, consolidation, and cycle times all still count.
#RMAReturn: Return merchandise authorization — the controlled intake of a return: who may send what back, under which entitlement, to which location. The RMA record is where return-reason data is born, which makes its quality a quality-signal issue, not a paperwork issue.

S

#S&OPPlan: Sales and operations planning — the recurring management cadence, typically monthly, that reconciles demand, supply, and financial plans into one agreed operating plan. Its cycle time is a structural limit: deviations that emerge mid-cycle wait for the next meeting unless a faster monitoring loop covers the gap.
#Safety stockPlan: Inventory held deliberately against uncertainty in demand or supply. Correctly sized, it converts variance into a calculable carrying cost; incorrectly sized, it is either an outage waiting to happen or working capital parked without a purpose. Service targets move; buffers should be re-decided when they do.
#Schedule adherenceTransform: The share of the released production schedule executed as released. Persistent gaps mean the schedule is not executable as built — common causes include nameplate-based capacity assumptions, material shortages, and unplanned downtime — and every promise planned against that schedule inherits the gap.
#SCOR: The Supply Chain Operations Reference model — the cross-industry standard framework for describing, measuring, and improving supply chains. Developed in 1996 by the consulting firm PRTM with AMR Research, endorsed by the Supply Chain Council, and stewarded today by ASCM.
#SCOR DS: The SCOR Digital Standard — ASCM's current edition of SCOR, published open-access under Creative Commons with free ASCM registration. It reorganizes the model around Orchestrate (Level 0) plus six Level-1 processes (Plan, Order, Source, Transform, Fulfill, Return), draws the supply chain as a continuous connected network rather than a pipeline, and defines eight performance attributes.
#Service-level agreement (SLA): A contractual performance floor — commonly an OTIF percentage — with defined consequences for missing it. SLAs turn reliability from a preference into priced exposure, which is why allocation and fulfillment decisions must read the contract terms, not just the quantities.
#SourceSource: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes: procuring, ordering, scheduling the delivery, receipt, and transfer of products and services — the inbound side of the chain, from supplier agreement to paid receipt.
#Spot market (freight)Fulfill: Transportation capacity bought transactionally at current market rates rather than under contract. The safety valve when contracted carriers decline tenders — and the expensive way to hide a structural capacity problem if used as a default.
#Supplier scorecardSource: A standing record of a supplier's measured performance — reliability, responsiveness, quality, cost — against agreed floors. A scorecard earns its keep when it is connected to thresholds that trigger decisions; a grade nobody acts on is a report, whatever it is called.

T

#Tender (freight)Fulfill: The offer of a specific load to a carrier under contracted terms. The tender acceptance rate — the share of offers carriers take — is a leading indicator of transportation trouble: it falls weeks before service does.
#TransformTransform: One of SCOR DS's six Level-1 processes: the scheduling and creation of products. Classic SCOR called it Make; the rename widens the scope beyond manufacturing to any transformation of inputs into offers, including kitting, assembly, and refurbishment.

W

#Work in process (WIP)Transform: Inventory that has left raw material but not yet become finished goods — value parked mid-transformation. WIP days of supply measure how long that value sits; growing WIP with flat output is a flow problem announcing itself.
#Write-backA2go term: A2go's term for committing a decision to the system of record — allocations and promise dates to the ERP, routings to the TMS or MES — so the decision exists where operations actually run, not in a slide. A recommendation without a write-back is advice; with one, it is an action.

Definitions are A2go's own wording and free to cite with attribution. SCOR is developed and stewarded by ASCM; SCOR-related entries paraphrase the open-access SCOR Digital Standard. A chip names the related SCOR DS process or attribute — a tie, not a claim of ASCM catalog membership. Entries marked "A2go term" are our vocabulary, not industry standard.