Reference
Glossary: the words operations run on.
Plain-English definitions of 31 terms from transport, warehousing, plants, finance and AI — what each means, why it matters, and which Autowhat product handles it.
Transport and logistics · Warehouse and cold chain · Plant and manufacturing · Finance and BFSI · AI, data and compliance
Transport and logistics
What is E-way bill?
An e-way bill is an electronic document generated on India's GST e-way bill portal before goods worth more than ₹50,000 move between places. Part A carries the invoice and consignment details, Part B the vehicle. For normal cargo it is valid for one day per 200 km, and it must be extended if the trip runs late.
What is FASTag?
FASTag is an RFID sticker on a vehicle's windscreen that pays national-highway tolls electronically from a linked bank account or wallet. It has been mandatory at NHAI toll plazas since February 2021; a vehicle without a valid tag pays a higher toll — double the fee in cash.
What is Lorry receipt (LR)?
A lorry receipt, also called a consignment note, is the document a transporter issues when it accepts goods for carriage. It records the consignor, consignee, goods, weight and freight, and the signed copy returned after delivery becomes the proof of delivery used for billing.
What is Proof of delivery (POD)?
Proof of delivery is evidence that goods reached the consignee in the agreed condition: a signed LR copy, an e-signature, a photograph or a geotagged scan. A clean POD is what lets the shipper raise its invoice, so slow or missing PODs delay cash.
What is Detention charges?
Detention is the charge a transporter raises when a truck is held beyond the agreed free time at a loading or unloading point. It is usually billed per vehicle per day and is one of the most disputed lines on a freight bill, which is why gate-in and gate-out times need to be recorded.
What is OTIF?
OTIF, on time in full, is the share of orders delivered by the promised date and in the full ordered quantity. An order that arrives on time but short, or complete but late, counts as a miss. It is the standard service metric between manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
What is Cross-dock?
A cross-dock is a facility where goods are moved from inbound trucks to outbound trucks with little or no storage in between. It cuts handling time and inventory, but only works when arrivals, sorting and departures are tightly scheduled.
What is Transport management system (TMS)?
A transport management system plans, executes and settles freight: bookings, trips, lorry receipts, tracking, proof of delivery, freight bills and payments. For an Indian transporter it also has to handle e-way bills, FASTag and the trip expense account drivers call hisab.
Warehouse and cold chain
What is FEFO?
FEFO, first expired first out, is a picking rule that dispatches the stock with the earliest expiry date first, whatever order it arrived in. It is the norm for food, beverages and pharmaceuticals, where FIFO alone can leave short-dated stock to expire on the shelf.
What is Reefer?
A reefer is a refrigerated truck or container that holds its cargo within a set temperature band, typically 2–8 °C for vaccines and dairy or −18 °C for frozen food. Its logger records the temperature through the trip so that any excursion can be proven or ruled out.
What is Temperature excursion?
A temperature excursion is any period during which a product sits outside its labelled storage range. Under good distribution practice it must be recorded, investigated for impact on the product and closed with a decision — release, quarantine or destroy — backed by the logger trace.
What is GxP?
GxP is shorthand for the good-practice regulations that apply to medicines and other regulated products — good manufacturing, distribution, laboratory and clinical practice. For temperature monitoring it means validated sensors, alarms that escalate, a tamper-evident audit trail and records that meet ALCOA+.
What is ALCOA+?
ALCOA+ is the set of data-integrity principles regulators expect of GxP records: Attributable, Legible, Contemporaneous, Original and Accurate, plus Complete, Consistent, Enduring and Available. In practice every reading and every change must show who, when and why, and nothing may be silently overwritten.
What is Dry ice?
Dry ice is solid carbon dioxide at about −78.5 °C, used to keep ultra-cold shipments below −60 °C. It sublimates as it works, so the quantity packed must be calculated from the lane's duration and ambient temperature, and it is regulated as a dangerous good in air transport.
Plant and manufacturing
What is Digital twin?
A digital twin is a live virtual model of a physical asset, process or network, fed continuously by real data from it. It lets a plant or supply chain see the current state, replay what happened and test a change — a new sequence, a new DC, a different charge mix — before doing it for real.
What is PLC and SCADA?
A programmable logic controller (PLC) runs a machine or line in real time; SCADA, supervisory control and data acquisition, collects data from many PLCs and lets operators supervise them. Together they are the plant's first source of truth for temperatures, speeds, states and alarms.
What is MES?
A manufacturing execution system tracks production on the shop floor: orders, batches, material genealogy, operators, quality checks and downtime. It sits between the ERP, which plans, and the PLCs, which control, and is where a heat, batch or coil gets its identity.
What is LIMS?
A laboratory information management system records samples, tests and results in a plant or lab, ties them to batches and specifications, and releases or holds material accordingly. In steel and pharma it is where chemistry and quality decisions live.
What is ANPR?
ANPR, automatic number plate recognition, reads vehicle registration plates from camera images. At a plant gate it records gate-in and gate-out automatically, matches the vehicle to its appointment and LR, and removes the handwritten register.
What is Weighbridge?
A weighbridge is a platform scale that weighs a whole vehicle. Weighing it empty (tare) and loaded (gross) gives the net load, which is checked against the invoice and the vehicle's permitted capacity before it leaves the gate.
Finance and BFSI
What is Three-way match?
A three-way match checks a supplier invoice against the purchase order and the goods receipt note before payment: right supplier, right items, right quantities, right prices. Mismatches and duplicates are held for a person to decide instead of being paid automatically.
What is Re-KYC?
Re-KYC is the periodic update of a customer's know-your-customer records. RBI requires banks and NBFCs to refresh KYC at least every two years for high-risk customers, every eight years for medium-risk and every ten for low-risk, and to act on any change in details in between.
What is Account Aggregator?
An Account Aggregator is an RBI-licensed entity that moves a person's financial data — bank statements, deposits, investments — from the institution that holds it to the one that needs it, only with the person's explicit, revocable consent. Lenders use it to assess loans without paper statements.
What is Propensity to pay?
Propensity to pay is a score estimating how likely a borrower is to pay a due instalment without intervention. Collections teams use it to decide who needs only a reminder, who needs a call and who needs a field visit, within the contact rules lenders must follow.
What is MCA e-forms?
MCA e-forms are the statutory filings Indian companies submit on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs portal — for example AOC-4 for financial statements and MGT-7 for the annual return. Each has due dates, attachments and late fees, and most need a professional's digital signature.
AI, data and compliance
What is Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)?
Retrieval-augmented generation is a way of building AI answers from your own documents: the question is matched to the most relevant passages, and a language model answers using only those passages, citing them. It keeps answers current and traceable without retraining the model.
What is Vector embeddings?
A vector embedding is a list of numbers that represents the meaning of a piece of text, an image or a record, so that similar meanings sit close together. A vector database stores them and finds the closest matches to a question, which is the retrieval step in RAG.
What is Knowledge graph?
A knowledge graph stores things — trucks, orders, invoices, people, rules — and the named relationships between them. Where a vector search finds what is similar, a graph answers what is connected, such as which order a delayed truck carries and which rule applies to it.
What is Open-weight model?
An open-weight model is a language model whose trained weights are published, such as Llama or Qwen, so it can run on a company's own servers or cloud account. Nothing has to leave the network, which matters for regulated data and India data residency.
What is WhatsApp Business Platform?
The WhatsApp Business Platform is Meta's API for businesses to message customers and staff at scale. Business-initiated messages use pre-approved templates; replies are free-form within 24 hours of the customer's last message. It is how a workforce or customer flow can run without a separate app.
What is DPDP Act 2023?
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is India's personal-data law. It requires a lawful basis — usually free, specific, informed consent — for processing personal data, gives individuals rights to access, correct and erase their data, and holds organisations, as Data Fiduciaries, accountable for breaches.