Business Acronyms

The people in OE look at ATP from the FAS generated from MRP to process sales.

Not a very good way to communicate if you ask me. Want a translation? Sure, no problem.

Order entry employees read the Final Assembly Shedule, generated from materials planning, to determine what goods are available to promise to customers.

I think that is clearer. But too often, people use acronyms in the interest of brevity. Personally, I think clarity supercedes brevity. In any case, careful avoidance of passive tense and redundant phrasing will chop more from a sentence than replacing "available to promise" with "ATP".

Business folks are fond of the acronyms, though. Ironically, they also love the word "utilize". People who slice a brief term like accounts payable down to AP on a regular basis somehow find it more desirable to say utilize, rather than use. Or, worse, they substitue utilization for the clear, monosyallabic, use.

Ridiculous. Especially when some of the abbreviations do not even make sense. Take the example of material replenishment planning. There are various ways to handle this: safety stock, for example. Computer programs often plan this replenishment, using one method or another.

What if I said these planned orders were POQ? Or FOQ? Any idea what the terms represent?

Well, we've introduced the idea of ordering, so O is most likely "Order". A good guess is that OQ is order quantity. More than good, in fact, that guess is correct. What about F and P?

Now instead, what if I told you the order policy was isometric. That's not crystal clear, either, but it has only one more syllable than either POQ or FOQ. Furthermore, its literal meaning is clear: equal amount. Not a far leap from "isometric order policy" to the idea that whenever the computer sees a need for more of an item, it orders the same amount.

FOQ order policy? Any clue yet? It stands for Fixed Order Quantity, the same as isometric as far as I know.

After all that, you may (or may not) be surprised to read that POQ is the one with the inaccuarte name. It stands for Periodic Order Quantity. Yet it does not mean that orders are released every week, or two weeks, or whenever the end of the period of choice falls. POQ dictates that when an order occurs, it should fulfill the needs for a period of time longer than the normal unit of time. That is not easy to express in an acronym. An idea that complicated probably should not be.

Please, use the entire language. Not just the letters.

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