Glossary

The terms behind the systems

Definitions used across our writing on custom software for machinery dealers — our own vocabulary first, then industry terms explained from the buyer’s side.

Our vocabulary

Catalog operations: The recurring work of keeping a multi-brand product catalog current — intake, verification, publication, history — measured in hours per year, not in features.
Deletability: The ability to remove or replace a system through a documented, tested exit path without losing business data or process continuity — we use a one-week removal exercise as the design test.
POC syndrome: Our name for the recurring pattern in which AI prototypes are funded and demonstrated but never given the ownership, integration work, or commercial commitment that production requires.
The data-model test: A pre-purchase proof: one difficult manufacturer, two product series, one historical price list and one current update — through the vendor's data model, ending in an export and a reversal.
The price-list update path: The eight steps between a manufacturer's new price book arriving and a salesperson quoting from it with confidence — intake to retained history, each with an owner.
The production gap: The work between a working prototype and a system running in production — verification, integration, security, operational ownership — which cheap prototyping makes more visible, not smaller.
The three layers of running cost: A way of splitting what a catalog-driven system costs after go-live: infrastructure, operations and availability (including mandatory upkeep), and capability development — only the last is discretionary.

Industry terms

CPQ (configure, price, quote): The software category for configuring products, pricing them, and producing quotes — strongest where configuration is complex, volume justifies a product model, and the buyer controls the pricing logic.
Effective-dated pricing: Prices carry validity intervals, so the system can reconstruct the catalog state for any date — one half of reproducing an old quote; the other half is an immutable quote snapshot.
ETIM and BMEcat: The open classification standard (ETIM) and exchange format (BMEcat) for technical product data — useful where manufacturers apply them, absent where they don't.
EU Data Act (for software buyers): EU regulation applicable since September 2025: switching and portability obligations for covered data-processing services, with regulated switching charges removed from January 2027. The right to switch is not the migration.
Golden set: A versioned reference set of real cases that model-dependent behavior is tested against before changes ship — alongside production monitoring, not instead of it.
Grounding vs. training: Grounding supplies client data to a model at request time without updating the model's weights; training changes the weights. The distinction answers whether data changes a model — not where it is processed, retained, or logged.
PIM (product information management): The software category for maintaining one trusted product record — descriptions, attributes, media — across catalogs and channels.