Resources
Glossary
26 definitions from field operations, time tracking and vendor security. Short answers, no filler.
Operations
- Operations management
- The practice of tracking how work is actually executed — who does what, where, when and with which hours — and correcting variances before they produce their effects.
- Field service management — FSM
- The coordination of work performed at customer sites rather than at a fixed location: scheduling, dispatch, time capture, job documentation and the reporting built on top of them.
- Dispatch
- The act of assigning a technician or crew to a specific job and communicating it to them, including reassignment during the day as conditions change.
- Work order
- The record authorizing a specific piece of work for a customer, holding the scope, the location, the assigned resources and the hours to be charged against it.
- Workload
- The volume of work assigned to a team, a person or a project over a given period, expressed in hours or days.
- Workload drift
- A widening gap between the workload planned for a project and the workload actually consumed.
- Utilization rate
- The share of an employee's available hours spent on billable or productive work, over a given period.
- Multi-site
- An organization whose teams work across several distinct locations — customer sites, job sites, branches — with no daily gathering point.
- Field service report
- The record produced after a job, bringing together the time spent, the work performed, the findings and any photos, attached to the customer or site concerned.
- External resource
- Someone who works on your jobs without being your employee — subcontractor, temporary worker, contractor — but whose activity still has to be scheduled and tracked.
Distinct from strategic management, which sets direction, and from financial reporting, which records what already happened.
Often sold as a category of its own. In practice it overlaps heavily with scheduling and operations management — compare capabilities, not category labels.
Dispatch quality is measured by how fast a change reaches the person affected — not by how good the plan looked at 7 a.m.
Where hours are not attached to a work order, per-job profitability cannot be calculated — only estimated.
Planned workload and actual workload almost always differ. That gap is the information worth managing.
Caught early, it is a decision. Caught at invoicing, it is already a loss.
A high utilization rate is not automatically good: it can equally signal that you are under-resourced and about to lose people.
This is the factor that pushes an organization past what a shared spreadsheet can handle, faster than headcount does.
This is the document that settles a dispute over whether a service was delivered.
Mixing them in with employees in the same system distorts your headcount reporting and your labor costs.
Time & HR
- Time clock
- The recording of an employee's start and end times, used as the basis for time tracking and payroll.
- Timesheet
- A summary of the hours an employee worked over a period, broken down by customer, project or activity.
- Extra work
- Any activity added to what the schedule planned: an additional job, an extended visit, a replacement, on-call time.
- Overtime
- Hours worked beyond the legal or contractual working time applicable to an employee, generally giving rise to a premium rate or compensatory rest.
- PTO — Paid time off
- Time away from work that an employee is paid for, whether it is pooled into a single balance or split into vacation, sick and personal leave.
- Replacement
- Assigning an employee to a job originally planned for someone else, following an absence or unavailability.
- Approval
- The step by which a manager signs off on a submission — hours, time off, extra work — before it feeds payroll or invoicing.
- Sales operations
- The function handling the administrative side of orders and delivered services: tracking assignments, preparing invoicing, and managing the contractual relationship with the customer.
Mobile self-reported clock-in from the field has largely replaced the physical badge reader, which never suited mobile crews.
Its accuracy determines both payroll and time-and-materials invoicing. A timesheet filled in from memory on Friday is a guess with a signature on it.
Deliberately broader than overtime: extra work may generate no overtime at all, and overtime can arise without any extra work being requested.
A legal concept whose thresholds and rates vary by country and by agreement — which is why operational tools should record the hours and leave the classification to payroll.
Accrual rules differ enormously between organizations and jurisdictions. A scheduling tool needs to reflect your rules, not impose a model.
The real cost of a replacement is rarely the hour worked. It is the coordination time it consumes.
An approval that is not backed by an explicit rule is just an acknowledgement of receipt.
In service businesses, sales operations is where every upstream failure eventually surfaces.
Security & compliance
- GDPR — General Data Protection Regulation
- The European regulation governing the processing of personal data: data minimization, specified purposes, limited retention periods, and enforceable rights for the people concerned.
- Data processor
- An organization that processes personal data on behalf of a controller, following its instructions and under a written contract.
- NIS2 — Network and Information Security Directive 2
- A European directive that substantially widens the range of organizations subject to cybersecurity obligations: risk management, supply chain security, incident notification and accountability at board level.
- RPO — Recovery Point Objective
- The maximum amount of data an organization accepts losing in a disaster, expressed as a duration. An RPO of one hour means accepting the loss of at most one hour of entries.
- RTO — Recovery Time Objective
- The maximum acceptable delay between a disaster occurring and the service being restored.
- Access segregation
- Separating data and permissions by perimeter — organization, team, project, site — so a user can only reach what concerns them.
- Audit trail
- The ability to reconstruct, after the fact, who performed which action, when, and on what.
- Data portability
- A customer's ability to retrieve all of their data in a usable format, during the contract and at its end, so they can move to another solution without loss.
It applies based on where the people are, not where the company is. A US company with employees or customers in Europe is in scope.
Every SaaS vendor relies on a chain of processors. Asking for the complete list, with each one's role and location, is standard diligence — not an unusual request.
NIS2 does not require any particular hosting arrangement. Its most concrete effect on smaller suppliers comes through the requirements their customers pass down contractually.
Determined by backup frequency. An RPO that has never been tested with a real restore is an intention, not a capability.
Not to be confused with RPO: RTO measures downtime, RPO measures data loss.
The first line of defense against internal leakage, which is more common than external intrusion.
It requires a retained and non-modifiable history — not simply an activity feed that can be edited or overwritten.
Ask for it contractually, with the format, the deadline and the cost specified. Portability that is not written down does not exist.
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