CRM (customer relationship management) software records every interaction with a customer or prospect - quotes, orders, calls and complaints - in one place, so anyone picking up the phone has the full history.

Cloud ERP is enterprise resource planning software hosted by the vendor and accessed over the internet, so there is no server in your building and updates arrive without an IT project.

Capacity planning works out whether you have enough machine time, labour and tooling to meet demand over a given period, and highlights where you will fall short before you promise a date.

A bottleneck is the operation in a production process with the least capacity, which sets the pace for everything else. The whole line can only run as fast as its bottleneck.

A bill of materials (BOM) is the structured list of every material, component and sub-assembly needed to build one unit of a product, with the quantity required for each.

Batch tracking records which group, or batch, of material each product was made from, so a quality problem can be traced back to its source and forward to every customer who received something from that batch.

Artificial intelligence in manufacturing means systems that learn patterns from your production data and use them to predict, classify or recommend - forecasting demand, spotting defects or flagging a machine before it fails.

Automated data collection captures production information directly from machines, barcode scans and sensors as work happens, instead of relying on someone writing it on a sheet and typing it up later.

An API (application programming interface) is a defined way for two software systems to exchange data automatically, so your MES, ERP and accounts package can share information without anyone rekeying it.

Advanced planning and scheduling (APS) software builds a production schedule that respects every constraint at once - material, machine capacity, labour and due dates - instead of planning each one in isolation.