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 property of a system that can be removed from a company's operations in about a week with no business impact — a forcing function for clean architecture and real ownership.
- POC syndrome
- The structural pattern in which AI proofs-of-concept get budgeted, built, and abandoned — a supplier-incentive problem, not a buyer-maturity problem.
- 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 distance between a working prototype and a system running in production — and it has grown wider, not narrower, as generating code got cheap.
- The three layers of running cost
- A way of splitting what a catalog-driven system costs after go-live: infrastructure, availability, and development — only the first two are unavoidable.
Industry terms
- CPQ (configure, price, quote)
- The enterprise software category for configuring products, pricing them, and producing quotes — built for manufacturers with their own product rules and high quote volume.
- Effective-dated pricing
- Prices carry validity dates, publishes are versioned, and the system can answer what a price was on any given day — which is what lets old quotes render as sent.
- 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: easier switching between data-processing services, switching charges removed from January 2027. The right to switch is not the migration.
- Golden set
- A fixed reference set of real cases that model-dependent behavior is tested against before any change ships — the regression suite for the AI parts of a system.
- Grounding vs. training
- Grounding: your data is retrieved and shown to a model at request time, and stays your data. Training: your data is absorbed into a model's weights. The distinction carries most AI data-privacy questions.
- PIM (product information management)
- The software category for maintaining one trusted product record — descriptions, attributes, media — across catalogs and channels.