Supply Chain Professional’s Reference Glossary

A new colleague — smart, motivated, and coming from outside supply chain — asked us for a glossary before their first day. We didn’t have one.

Supply chain has built one of the most impenetrable walls of jargon in business. It slows onboarding, excludes capable people from conversations, and creates real risk when the same acronym means different things to different parties in the same contract.

So we built one. The Supply Chain Professional’s Reference Glossary covers 333 terms across 18 categories:

Planning · Inventory · Procurement · Logistics & Transport · Technology & Systems · Performance & Metrics · Manufacturing & Lean · Customs & Trade · Incoterms 2020 · Pharma & Life Sciences · Quality · Medical Devices · Certifications & Standards · EU Trade · Trade Law & Regulation · Industry Bodies · Sustainability & Circular Economy · Operations Research

It spans the everyday (SKU, KPI, OTIF) and the increasingly unavoidable (CBAM, CSDDD, PPWR, DPP) — terms that were niche regulatory concerns five years ago and now appear in almost every European supply chain conversation.

Unusually for a general reference, it includes the Irish and EU institutional landscape: IIFA, IRHA, IEA, FTAI, IPICS, LSCSG and Ibec alongside ASCM, CILT and CSCMP.

Written for practitioners, not as an academic reference — definitions are anchored to how terms are actually used in client work.

Edition 1.0 · 19 pages · Free download

Spotted a gap or a definition you’d word differently? We update this as contributions come in — get in touch.