A Gantt chart shows jobs and operations as horizontal bars along a timeline, making it immediately obvious what runs when, what overlaps and what is running late.

A forecast is an estimate of future demand, used to plan materials, capacity and cash. It will be wrong - the point is to be roughly right early enough to act on it.

Discrete manufacturing produces countable, individual items - parts, assemblies, machines - that can be broken back down into components, as opposed to process manufacturing which produces bulk material by formula.

A digital twin is a live virtual model of a machine, line or process, fed by real data from the physical thing, so you can test changes and predict problems without stopping production.

Data analytics in manufacturing means examining production data to find patterns you cannot see from the floor - which jobs lose money, which machines cause delays, which customers are quietly unprofitable.

A dashboard presents the handful of production figures that matter - output, OEE, late jobs, WIP - on one screen, updating live, so problems are visible without anyone building a report.

A work order is the instruction that authorises production of a specific quantity of a product, carrying the materials, operations, times and due date the shop floor needs to build it.

Work in progress (WIP) is everything that has been started but not finished - part-made products sitting between operations. It is money already spent that has not yet turned into an invoice.

XML (extensible markup language) is a text format for structuring data so different software systems can read the same file, still widely used for EDI, invoices and machine configuration.

Cycle time is how long one operation or one unit actually takes from start to finish, measured on the floor. It is the building block for capacity, scheduling and realistic delivery dates.