Manufacturing Glossary - 50+ Terms Explained

Whether you are new to manufacturing management or optimising your shop floor operations, this glossary provides clear, structured definitions of essential terminology used in production planning, shop floor scheduling, and lean manufacturing.

T-Card System: A classic visual management tool using T-shaped cards placed in board slots to track production status, jobs, or tasks.
Kanban: A lean scheduling system designed to optimise workflow and inventory by pulling work through production only when there is demand.
Shop Floor Scheduling: The detailed, day- allocation of jobs, machinery capacity, and labour on the manufacturing floor.
Work in Progress: Partially finished goods, materials, and sub-assemblies currently moving through the manufacturing process.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness: A standardized metric measuring manufacturing productivity by comparing actual output to potential capacity.
Bill of Materials: A comprehensive, structured list of all raw materials, components, and sub-assemblies needed to manufacture a product.
Job Card: A physical or digital document tracking the specific instructions, routing, and progress of a single manufacturing order.
Capacity Planning: The process of matching your production workloads against your available shop floor machinery and labour hours.
Enterprise Resource Planning: A complex suite of integrated business software managing inventory, finance, purchasing, HR, and production.
Lean Manufacturing: A production methodology focusing on waste minimization and continuous workflow improvement.
Just-in-Time: An inventory management strategy aligning raw material orders and production directly with customer demand.
Takt Time: The required rate of production needed to match the speed of customer demand.
Cycle Time: The actual time required to complete a single manufacturing operation or build one unit from start to finish.
Lead Time: The total latency elapsed between the placement of a customer order and the final receipt of the finished product.
Bottleneck: A work centre or operational stage whose limited capacity restricts the total throughput of the entire factory.
Finite Capacity Scheduling: A scheduling methodology that plans production strictly within the realistic limits of available machine and labour hours.
Production Routing: The defined sequence of workstations, machines, and operations required to fabricate a specific part or product.
Visual Management: A lean manufacturing strategy using visual cues, colour-coded boards, and displays to communicate operational status instantly.
Single-Minute Exchange of Die: A lean system for dramatically reducing the setup and changeover time required to switch a machine between production jobs.
Andon Board: A visual alert system on the manufacturing floor that notifies teams of operational problems or production halts in real time.
Line Balancing: The optimisation process of evenly distributing workload and tasks across all workstations in a manufacturing line.
Shift Handover: The structured operational communication and status exchange between outgoing and incoming manufacturing teams.
Kaizen: A Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement involving all employees from shop floor to management.
Due Date Scheduling: A production sequencing strategy that organises manufacturing jobs based on customer delivery commitments.

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