Glossary
Plain words for the jargon.
Every industry hides behind its vocabulary. Here is ours, explained – so nobody has to sit in a meeting pretending to know what a fit-gap is.
Decision and project
- Fit-gap
- A structured comparison of what the standard software already does against what your processes actually need. The gap is what has to be built, replaced or dropped – and it is the honest basis for any budget.
- System map
- A picture of every system in use, what data flows between them and where people copy things by hand. Most companies have never seen theirs on one page.
- Media break
- Any point where information leaves one system and is re-entered into another by hand – printing an order to type it in again, or a spreadsheet between two departments. Each one costs time and produces errors.
- Target architecture
- The picture of how systems, data and responsibilities should fit together once the project is done. It is what keeps a series of small decisions from adding up to a mess.
- Roadmap
- The sequence of phases with results and decision points – not a wish list, but an order of work in which each step is usable on its own.
- Budget corridor
- A realistic range instead of a false exact figure. Before scope and data quality are clear, any single number is a guess; a corridor is honest about that.
- MVP scope
- The smallest set of functions that can go into productive use and already carry value. Everything else follows afterwards. It is what stops a project from having to be finished completely before it is worth anything.
- Backlog
- The ordered list of everything still to be done, most valuable first. It makes the "what comes after go-live" question answerable instead of open-ended.
- Go-live
- The day the new system carries the real business. Everything before it is preparation; everything after it is operations.
Operations and support
- SLA
- Service level agreement: a binding rule for how support requests are classified, how quickly we respond and how critical issues escalate. It is not a promise that every problem is solved immediately.
- Response time and resolution time
- Response time is the time until a qualified reply: the ticket is understood, classified and the next step is clear. Resolution time is how long the fix actually takes, and depends on cause, data and third parties. The two are not the same, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something.
- Allowance
- The hours included in a monthly package. Anything beyond it is billed at the published rates, so a busy month does not become a surprise.
- Release check
- Reviewing an Odoo update before it is applied: what changes, what it touches in your extensions, what has to be tested. It is the difference between an upgrade and an incident.
Platform and technology
- Open core (offener Kern)
- A product whose core is open source while some additions are not. Odoo works this way: the community core is under LGPLv3 and readable by anyone, the enterprise additions are licensed. We say so rather than claiming to be fully open source.
- Clean core
- The principle that the core of a standard system is never modified; extensions attach beside it through defined points. SAP asks for it, Microsoft does the same with Business Central. It keeps upgrades safe – and it limits how far you can go.
- PostgreSQL
- The open-source database Odoo stores your data in. Open licence, no database licence cost, and the standard tools for backup, replication and analysis work with it out of the box.
- Multi-company
- Several legal entities on one platform, with shared master data but separate books, tax logic and permissions. What matters is that a document can cross a company boundary without leaving the system.
- Faceted search
- Search that narrows results by properties – material, thread, pressure range – rather than by guessing the right search word. With a hundred thousand articles it is the difference between finding and browsing.
AI in operations
- Human in the loop
- An AI result is prepared but never posted on its own – a person releases it. That is not a limitation, it is what makes AI usable in accounting and order processing at all.
- Orchestration
- The layer that decides which model is asked what, in which order, with which data, and what happens when a step fails. Without it you have a chatbot; with it you have a process.
- Vector search
- Searching by meaning rather than by matching words. It is what lets an assistant find the right document when the question uses different wording than the text does.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol: a standard way to give an AI model controlled access to tools and data – which functions it may call, with which permissions. It is how AI reaches your systems without an open door.
Connections
- OCI punch-out
- Open Catalog Interface: your customer jumps out of their own procurement system straight into your catalogue, assembles a basket and hands it back as an order – without leaving their process. It is often the condition for being allowed to supply a large buyer at all.
- Automated small-parts warehouse
- A robotic warehouse that moves containers to the picking station instead of sending people to the shelf. It only pays off when the ERP talks to it directly: reservations, transfers and completion messages in the same process, not through a nightly file.
Missing a term? Tell us and it goes in. A word we cannot explain is a word we should not be using.
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