Sourcing and Procurement
Glossary
Your trusted guide to exploring sourcing and procurement terms & definitions,
from the world’s leading procurement experts and companies
Perverse Incentive
A direct negative or unconscious behavior that drives unintended consequences.
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Picking
The process of selecting items from stock or assembling the items required to fill an order
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Pieces
The item that is being handled. This is usually the lowest unit of issue in the delivery process and it may be case lots in the unloading and receiving processes. However, it is not unusual for some items to still be in case lots while others are listed as "each " at certain points in the handling process, such as replenishment.
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Pipeline
Common term in technology for a list of prioritised projects against which a program or project manager can monitor and report progress.
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Pivot Table
The PivotTable function in Microsoft Excel is an organization and analysis tool that displays fields and records. It's an interactive worksheet that allows you to summarize large amounts of information. Pivot tables allow you to transform a set of data into an easy-to-arrange and organized summary grid. The grid of information it produces helps you quickly find patterns, trends and outliers. In fact, when you hear the words "slice and dice," you should instantly think pivot tables. Most commonly used in spend analytics and response evaluations.
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Physical Asset Specificity
The use of a capital good to a narrow purpose. Asset specificity applies to capital designed to have a single function, or labor trained to perform a single task, and has its limited uses because of some inherent restriction on other possible uses. The more specific an asset, the lower its potential resale value or redeployability. Companies may be reluctant to invest in such assets in a poor or uncertain economy. When a company purchases a highly specific asset, this purchase is considered a sunk cost, since the asset will likely not be saleable or useable for purposes other than its intended purchase.
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Pilot Program
A test of the automation that follows the initial proof-of-concept phase to see if the robot will perform as expected in more advanced, complicated conditions.
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