# Glossary of Terms
## AI Operations Center — Domain & Technical Vocabulary

**Document Owner:** AiSO Platform Team  
**Last Updated:** May 2026  
**Audience:** All stakeholders

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## Domain Terms (Food Manufacturing / CPG)

| Term | Definition |
|------|-----------|
| **Trade Deduction** | A dollar amount deducted from a customer’s remittance payment, usually claiming a trade promotion, pricing adjustment, shortage, or return. The manufacturer must validate whether the deduction is legitimate. |
| **Trade Deal** | A contractual agreement between the manufacturer and a retailer for promotional pricing, bill-backs, scan-downs, or volume rebates. Deals have defined SKU eligibility, customer eligibility, date ranges, and funded amounts. |
| **Remittance** | The payment document sent by a customer alongside their payment. Can arrive as EDI 812, PDF, email, or portal download. Contains deduction codes and amounts. |
| **Reason Code** | A code on a deduction indicating the customer’s claimed reason (e.g., "OI" = off-invoice, "AD" = advertising). Codes are customer-specific — Walmart’s "OI" may differ from Kroger’s "OI". |
| **Three-Way Match** | The process of matching a Purchase Order (PO), Goods Receipt (GR), and Invoice to verify that what was ordered, received, and billed all agree. |
| **GR (Goods Receipt)** | A record confirming that physical goods were received at a warehouse, including quantities and quality status. |
| **ASN (Advanced Shipping Notice)** | An electronic document sent by a supplier before shipment, listing what’s being shipped, quantities, and carrier details. |
| **BOL (Bill of Lading)** | A legal document between shipper and carrier detailing the type, quantity, and destination of goods being shipped. |
| **DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)** | A measure of the average number of days a company takes to collect payment after a sale. Lower is better. |
| **DPD (Days Past Due)** | The number of days an invoice or account has been overdue beyond its payment terms. |
| **Aging Bucket** | A time-based grouping of outstanding receivables: 0-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, 91+ days. |
| **ASL (Approved Supplier List)** | A vetted list of suppliers authorized to provide specific goods or services. Purchases from non-ASL suppliers require additional approval. |
| **PR (Purchase Requisition)** | An internal request to purchase goods or services, which must be approved before converting to a Purchase Order. |
| **PO (Purchase Order)** | A legally binding document issued to a supplier, committing to purchase specific goods at agreed prices and terms. |
| **MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error)** | A forecast accuracy metric: the average absolute percentage difference between forecast and actual demand. Lower is better. |
| **Forecast Bias** | A systematic tendency to over-forecast or under-forecast demand. Measured as mean error (not absolute). |
| **LTO (Limited Time Offer)** | A promotional product or price available for a defined period, often causing demand spikes. |
| **DC (Distribution Center)** | A warehouse facility where products are received, stored, and shipped to retail locations. |
| **SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)** | A unique identifier for a specific product variant used for inventory tracking. |
| **CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods)** | The industry category for branded food, beverage, and household products sold through retail channels. |
| **Accrual** | A financial reserve set aside to fund expected trade promotion deductions. |
| **Fund Balance** | The remaining amount available in a trade deal’s accrual fund after deductions have been applied. |
| **Scan-Down** | A trade promotion where the manufacturer pays a per-unit rebate based on the retailer’s point-of-sale scan data. |
| **Bill-Back** | A trade promotion where the retailer deducts the promotional amount from their payment after the promotional period ends. |

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## Platform & Architecture Terms

| Term | Definition |
|------|-----------|
| **MVP (Minimum Viable Product)** | In this platform, refers to one of 5 functional modules: MVP1 (Trade Deductions), MVP2 (Collections), MVP3 (Invoice Triage), MVP4 (Buyer Copilot), MVP5 (Demand Sensing). |
| **Agent Swarm** | A coordinated group of AI agents that work together to process a case. Each swarm has an orchestrator that delegates to specialist sub-agents. |
| **Orchestrator** | The top-level agent in a swarm that coordinates the workflow, delegates to sub-agents, and assembles the final output. |
| **Sub-Agent** | A specialist agent within a swarm that handles a specific task (e.g., ClassifierAgent, ValidityChecker, UpliftScorer). |
| **MCP (Model Context Protocol)** | A standardized interface for AI agents to call external tools and systems. Each MCP system represents one enterprise system (SAP, AR platform, etc.). |
| **MCP Gateway** | The unified access layer that routes all external system calls through circuit breakers, rate limiters, and audit logging. |
| **HITL (Human-in-the-Loop)** | A workflow pattern where agent-generated proposals are routed to a human for approval before execution. Used for high-value, high-risk, or low-confidence decisions. |
| **ADLC (Agent Development Lifecycle)** | A 6-phase methodology for building enterprise AI agents: Discover → Design → Build → Evaluate → Deploy → Operate. |
| **Boundary Condition** | A configurable threshold that controls agent behavior (e.g., confidence cutoff, dollar limit, autonomy level). Stored in the database for runtime tuning without code deployment. |
| **Golden Case** | An SME-labeled ground truth example used for evaluating agent accuracy. The gold standard for measuring agreement-with-human. |
| **Agreement Rate** | The percentage of agent decisions that match what a human SME would have decided. Primary quality metric. |
| **Drift** | A change in the statistical distribution of agent inputs or outputs over time, potentially indicating degraded performance. |
| **Circuit Breaker** | A fault-tolerance pattern that automatically stops sending requests to a failing system, preventing cascade failures. |
| **Writeback** | An operation where the agent writes data back to an enterprise system (e.g., posting a credit memo to SAP). Requires multi-tier approval. |
| **Value Ledger** | A financial tracking system that records the dollar impact of every agent action as realized, projected, or unrealized value. |
| **Persona** | A user role configuration (AR Manager, AP Manager, Buyer, Planner, Executive) that customizes the UI layout, KPI emphasis, and MVP ordering. |
| **OPA (Open Policy Agent)** | A policy-as-code framework for defining and enforcing authorization rules, spend thresholds, and compliance checks. |
| **Eval Harness** | An automated testing framework that runs agent decisions against golden cases and measures agreement rates. |
| **Cost Meter** | A tracking system that monitors LLM token usage and cost per agent run, with per-MVP budget guardrails. |
| **What-If Sandbox** | An interactive tool for simulating the impact of boundary condition changes on agent behavior before applying them. |
| **Autonomy Ratchet** | The governance principle that agents start with low autonomy and earn more autonomous decision-making authority as their agreement rates prove reliable. |
| **Action Proposal** | A structured recommendation generated by an agent, containing the proposed action, evidence, confidence, and policy evaluation. Must be approved (or auto-approved) before execution. |
| **NBA (Next-Best Action)** | The agent’s prioritized recommendation for what a human operator should do next across all MVPs. |
| **Escalation** | A routing of a case to a specialized team (Legal, Audit, Supplier Quality) when it exceeds the agent’s scope or authority. |
| **Correlation ID** | A unique identifier that links related events across multiple systems and tables for end-to-end tracing. |
| **Idempotency Key** | A unique identifier attached to write operations to prevent duplicate mutations when retrying failed requests. |
| **Prompt Version** | A versioned system prompt used by an agent, with semantic versioning, performance tracking, and A/B testing support. |
| **Prompt Refinement** | A suggested improvement to an agent’s prompt, generated from patterns detected in SME override reasons. |

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## Acronym Quick Reference

| Acronym | Full Form |
|---------|----------|
| ADLC | Agent Development Lifecycle |
| AR | Accounts Receivable |
| AP | Accounts Payable |
| ASL | Approved Supplier List |
| ASN | Advanced Shipping Notice |
| BOL | Bill of Lading |
| CPG | Consumer Packaged Goods |
| DC | Distribution Center |
| DPD | Days Past Due |
| DPP | Demand Planning Platform |
| DSO | Days Sales Outstanding |
| GR | Goods Receipt |
| HITL | Human-in-the-Loop |
| IBP | Integrated Business Planning |
| LTO | Limited Time Offer |
| MAPE | Mean Absolute Percentage Error |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol |
| MVP | Minimum Viable Product |
| NBA | Next-Best Action |
| OPA | Open Policy Agent |
| PO | Purchase Order |
| PR | Purchase Requisition |
| RBAC | Role-Based Access Control |
| S2P | Source-to-Pay |
| SKU | Stock Keeping Unit |
| SOX | Sarbanes-Oxley Act |
| TPM | Trade Promotion Management |
