Some useful words to know if you are in business and must discuss operations or manufacturing in English.

Business English: Operations

Inventory or stock refers to the goods and materials that a business holds for the ultimate goal of resale, production or utilization.

OEE identifies the percentage of manufacturing time that is truly productive. OEE is calculated by multiplying Quality (% good parts) by Performance (% of maximum rate) by Availability (% up time).

The process of maintaining or preserving something, or the state of being maintained. This involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment and machinery.

Lean manufacturing is a production process based on an ideology of maximizing productivity while simultaneously minimizing waste. The lean principle sees waste is anything that doesn't add value.

In commerce, a supply chain is a system where organizations, people, activities, information, and resources are involved in supplying a product or service to a consumer.

Sales and operations planning is an integrated business management process through which the executive/leadership team continually achieves focus, alignment and synchronization among all functions of the organization.

Capacity planning is the process of determining the production capacity needed to meet changing demands for its products.

Process mapping is a technique used to visually map out workflows and processes. The purpose of process mapping is to communicate how a process works in a concise and straightforward way.

A lead time is the latency between the initiation and completion of a process, usually in the context of ordering products and delivery times.

Enterprise resource planning is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real time and facilitated through software and technology.

5S is a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seisō, seiketsu, and shitsuke. These have been translated as "sort", "set in order", "shine", "standardize", and "sustain".

SMED is one of the many lean production methods for reducing waste in a manufacturing process. It provides a rapid and efficient way of converting a manufacturing process from running one product to another.

Just-in-time is an inventory management method in which goods are received from suppliers only as they are needed. The main objective of this method is to reduce inventory holding costs and increase inventory turnover.