APPENDIX B

Acronym and Symbol Definitions

Business and technology professionals are notorious for using a wide variety of three-letter and four-letter acronyms and symbols in their discussions, presentations, and literature. These often cryptic abbreviations represent the long string of words and modifiers that define some business or information technology concept or operation. Acronyms and symbols reduce the amount of typing necessary in memos and reports and, sadly, also allow much more information to be displayed on a PowerPoint slide ;-). As the emoticon at the end of the previous sentence indicates, even this author is sometimes tempted to use them. The creators of these acronyms and symbols usually do the courtesy of defining them when they are first used in a written communication or slide presentation. However, once an acronym or symbol becomes commonly used within a particular field, this courtesy definition is dropped under the assumption that everyone knows what it means. Examples of this are DVD, VCR, TV, and so forth.

Fortunately, most of these acronyms and symbols have a unique definition. But readers need to be aware that an acronym or symbol can have more than one meaning based on where it is used. For example, CD can mean one thing to a music listener (compact disk), another thing to a finance professional (certificate of deposit), another thing to a governmental worker (civil defense), and with a small change to Cd, signifies the element cadmium to a chemist. Okay, most of you will say that this is obvious. But it may not be to others in a group reviewing a presentation. Imagine a meeting for the first time between a marketing department and finance planners where the marketing team is describing the potential market size for a new CD product they want to introduce. How far do you think the presentation will go before someone asks what CD stands for? My experience is that it will go further than one would think because the average person does not want to be seen as not knowing what a term means if it is not defined at the start.

In other instances, there are different acronyms for essentially the same concept or meaning. For example, first-in-first-out (FIFO) in manufacturing and first-come-first-serve (FCFS) in service processes both convey the same priority rule. The proper usage here is being aware of the context in which the priority rule is applied.

Texting on cell phones, brief e-mails, and limited messages in social media applications have led to the creation of images (emoticons such as the one I used earlier) and a wide variety of acronyms for common phrases and expressions. To keep the list of acronyms and symbols in this appendix manageable, the entries are restricted to those more appropriate for our discussion of integrating the management of information and business processes. By choice, the symbols for various currencies are also not included.

Only basic definitions are given in this appendix. See appendix A for more in-depth definitions of more important usages.

aaS. Available as a service. This acronym is attached to different capital letters to indicate that whatever the capital letter represents is available online.

B&M. Brick and mortar. Refers to physical business locations.

B2B. Business to business.

B2C. Business to customer.

B2G. Business to government.

B2I. Business to Internet.

B2M. Business to machine.

BI. Business intelligence.

BOM. Bill of materials.

BYOD. Bring your own device. Refers to the practice of allowing employees to use their personal electronic devices for work-related activities.

© Copyright sign

C2B. Customer to business.

C2C. Customer to customer.

C2G. Customer (citizen) to government.

C2I. Customer to Internet.

C2M. Customer to machine.

CAR. Corrective action request.

CMYK. Cyan-magenta-yellow-key, a subtractive color management system for printers where the key is normally a black pattern that the other colors are aligned to form a color image. For black text or black portions of images only the key is printed.

CRC. Cyclic redundancy check.

CRM. Customer relationship management.

DGPS. Differential global positioning system.

DPBC. Delivery point bar code.

DSS. Decision support systems.

ERP. Enterprise Resource Planning.

FAQ. Frequently asked question.

FCFS. First-come-first-served. A priority rule for serving customers in the order that they arrive.

FIFO. First-in-first-out. A priority rule for using the oldest inventory first or processing the oldest item in the queue first.

G2B. Government to business.

G2C. Government to customer (citizen).

G2I. Government to Internet.

G2M. Government to machine.

GIGO. Garbage-in-garbage-out. A truism that expresses that your result is only as good as the materials or sources of information you use.

GIS. Geographical information system. Sometimes it is defined as geospatial or geographical information science.

GPIB. General purpose interface bus. See HP-IB.

GPS. Global positioning system.

# Hashtag. A metadata symbol used to designate a topic for group discussion that can be more easily searched for.

HP-IB. Hewlett-Packard interface bus, same as GPIB or IEEE-488.

I2B. Internet to business.

I2G. Internet to government.

I2C. Internet to customer.

I2M. Internet to machine.

IaaS. Infrastructure as a service.

IMHO. In my humble opinion. A shorthand notation to tell the reader that the source of the comment is you.

IoT. Internet of things.

IRC. Internet relay chat.

ISBN. International standard book code.

LIFO. Last-in-first-out. A priority rule for serving the last arrival or using the newest inventory first. This rule is not a good idea, but is often used by those who do not manage their inventory wisely or serve their customers fairly.

M2B. Machine to business.

M2C. Machine to customer.

M2G. Machine to government.

M2I. Machine to Internet.

M2M. Machine to machine.

MEGO. My eyes glaze over. Shorthand for the feeling after viewing presentation slides with too much information in small print.

MIS. Management Information Systems.

MRP. Materials requirements planning.

MRP-II. Manufacturing resource planning.

N/A. Not applicable. Useful when the information in a cell in a relational or other structured database is meaningless or not necessary.

NoSQL. Non-relational database designed for large data systems.

OCR. Optical character recognition.

PaaS. Programs available as a service.

PBX. Private branch exchange.

PDM. Product data management.

POS. Point of sale.

QR. Quick response when used as a modifier for code.

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PSTN. Public switched telephone network.

RDBMS. Relational database management system.

RFID. Radio frequency identification.

RGB. Red-green-blue, an additive color management system used for displays and projected images. White is produced by projecting all colors and black is produced by projecting no color.

SaaS. Software available as a service.

SKU. Stock keeping unit.

SMB. Small-to-medium business.

SOP. Sales and operations planning

SPC. Statistical process control.

SQL. Structured query language, used to access relational databases.

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TLA. Three-letter acronym.

TQC. Total quality control.

TQM. Total quality management.

UCC. Uniform code council.

UPC. Universal product code.

USB. Universal serial bus.

VBA. Visual Basic for Applications.

VMI. Vendor managed inventory, sometimes called bin stock.

VoIP. Voice over Internet protocol.

VRM. Vendor relationship management.

WAAS. Wide area augmentation system. A method for improving GPS accuracy.

WIP. Work-in-process.