ARPReference

Every term, and where it is defined

Two vocabularies meet here: the words autonomy needs, and the inherited language of resource planning those words are built on. A reader who arrives knowing one of them rarely knows the other, and the argument needs both.

59 terms17 lettersReviewed September 2026

Each entry names the page where the term does its work, because a definition read away from the argument it serves is a synonym. Every term carries an anchor of its own, and those anchors do not change.

A

AccrualScenarios
An entry recognising a cost or a revenue in the period it was incurred or earned, not the period it is invoiced or paid, reversed in the next period so nothing is counted twice.
ActThe loop
Executing the decision into the store the system reads from, inside the authority granted for that action type. A path ending in a queue, an export or a ticket has not acted; it has asked someone else to.
Act within bounds (level 3)The maturity model
Software settles routine cases inside explicit thresholds, records what it did, and escalates everything else. Consequence becomes shared here for the first time.
AdaptThe loop
Remaking the plan as conditions move, carrying what reconciliation showed into the next decision, and handing a person what needs judgement.
Advise (level 1)The maturity model
Software produces a recommendation; a person decides whether to follow it and enters the result. Nothing is committed by the software itself.
Agents (resource class)The definition
The compute, licences, permissions and authority that acting software consumes. No earlier era of resource planning had to plan the thing doing the planning.
Allocate across resources (level 5)The maturity model
Software trades one resource against another toward objectives a person stated, inside a risk envelope a person set. The objective is granted; individual trades are not approved case by case.
Authority budgetGovernance
The finite quantity of action a system is permitted over a period, counted and consumed like any other allocated resource, so that authority carries a utilisation and a concentration as well as a ceiling.
Autonomous resource planningThe definition
An architecture in which the system that holds the state of an enterprise's resources is also the system that plans against them, acts inside granted authority, and records the consequence in the ledger it read from.
Available to promiseScenarios
The uncommitted quantity of an item that can still be promised to a new order on a given date, after existing reservations and confirmed inbound supply are counted against it.

B

Bill of materialsHistory
The structured list of components and sub-assemblies needed to build one unit of a product. Exploding it against a production schedule is the calculation material requirements planning was built to perform.
Bounded authorityThe principles
Authority held as enumerated action types with value ceilings, conditions, a named grantor and a revocation date. A general permission to act is not a grant, and what falls outside the grant is escalated, never attempted.

C

Capacity (resource class)The definition
Equipment, facilities, production capacity and throughput. Modelled in detail for forty years, and still planned in a spreadsheet at most companies.
ClosureThe ARP test
The property that a system confirms the outcome it intended actually happened, and does not finish when the instruction was sent. Without it the system has issued an action and learned nothing about its effect.
Compensating entryGovernance
An entry that reverses the effect of an earlier one while leaving both on the record. It is how a posted mistake is corrected in a ledger where nothing is deleted.
ConfidenceGovernance
A system's own estimate that the decision it is about to take is correct. It means something only once calibrated against outcomes per action type, and it may lower the threshold for stopping without ever raising a ceiling.
Consequence holderThe maturity model
Whoever answers when a decision turns out wrong: a person, a person and the system jointly, or the party that granted the authority the system acted inside. The maturity model grades by this, not by capability.
Counterparty limitScenarios
The maximum exposure a treasury policy permits to a single bank, issuer or trading partner, which caps where surplus cash may be placed whatever rate is on offer.
Cycle countScenarios
Counting part of the inventory on a rolling schedule instead of all at once each year, so a discrepancy is found while the transaction that caused it can still be traced.

D

Decision recordGovernance
The record of what was observed, what was decided, under which grant and what was posted as a result. It is joined to the ledger entry by reference, never merged into it.
DunningScenarios
The staged sequence of reminders and escalations applied to an overdue receivable, set by days past due and by the collections policy in force at the time.

E

EscalationThe ARP test
The defined route by which a decision passes to a person, taken when a case falls outside the grant, outside the conditions the grant names, or outside the system's own confidence.
ExceptionThe principles
A case the system does not settle, routed to a person under a stated rule. If everything is an exception nothing has been automated, and if nothing is, no tolerance was ever set.
Execute on instruction (level 2)The maturity model
Software carries out steps a person has already decided, exercising no judgement of its own. Most of what is sold as automation sits here, and for most processes it is the correct place to be.

F

Finite capacity schedulingScenarios
Scheduling that respects the hours a work centre actually has, placing an operation only where capacity is free. Loading work first and reporting the overload afterwards is scheduling in name onlywards.
Frozen horizonScenarios
The period nearest to now in which a production or supply plan is held stable, so that a change inside it is handled as an exception with a named cost, never absorbed quietly by replanning.

G

General ledgerScenarios
The ledger holding the accounts a company reports from, into which each subledger posts in summary. It is authoritative for balances, not for the transactions behind them.
GrantGovernance
The document that states what a system may do, at what value, under what conditions, on whose signature and until when. A system spends a grant and cannot widen one.

I

Information (resource class)The definition
Master data, documents, contracts and the enterprise record itself. Both a resource and the medium every other class is planned in, so autonomy degrades exactly as fast as it does.
InterpretThe loop
Turning a signal into a meaning for one particular business, read against its policies, its commitments and its history. The same shortage is routine in one company and a breached contract in another.

L

Landed costScenarios
The total cost of getting an item to the place it is used, including freight, duty, insurance and handling. The supplier's price alone is not the cost.
Lead timeScenarios
The elapsed time between ordering something and having it available to use, including supplier processing, transport, receipt and inspection. Its variability matters as much as its length.

M

Master production scheduleHistory
The statement of which finished items a plant intends to build, in what quantity and in which period. Every dependent material and capacity requirement is calculated from it.
Materials (resource class)The definition
Inventory, procurement, suppliers and logistics. Resource planning began here, and most of the vocabulary the field still uses was inherited from it.
Maturity levelThe maturity model
One of six grades describing what a system is permitted to do and who carries the consequence when it is wrong. A level is read per resource class and per process, never for a company as a whole.
Money (resource class)The definition
Cash, receivables, payables, the ledger, the close and treasury. Its record has been computerised longest and its judgement automated least.

O

ObserveThe loop
Reading the world as it moves: transactions as they post, events as they arrive, signals the enterprise did not generate itself. A nightly extract is polling, and the position it describes has already changed by the time anyone looks at it.
Own the outcome (level 4)The maturity model
Software plans continuously, acts, reconciles outcome against intent, and catches its own failures before a person reports them.

P

People (resource class)The definition
Labour, roles, assignment, scheduling and workforce planning. A wrong allocation is carried by a person, not absorbed by a balance, which is why bounded authority matters most in this class.
Performance obligationScenarios
A distinct promise to transfer a good or a service within a contract. Revenue is recognised as each obligation is satisfied, not when the invoice is issued.
Period closeScenarios
The sequence of reconciliations, accruals, valuations and reviews that fixes a reporting period, after which the figures can be reported and the period is locked against further posting.
PlanThe loop
Settling what should happen next against objectives and constraints, including the dependencies between every resource class a single decision touches.

R

ReconcileThe loop
Proving intent against outcome, recording the consequence, and settling the difference against evidence from outside the system. Without it a system knows only what it meant to do.
ReconciliationThe loop
Checking a record against a separately kept account of the same facts, such as a bank statement against the cash ledger, and resolving each difference. A net figure is not a reconciliation.
Record (level 0)The maturity model
Software stores and reports decisions people have already taken. Every judgement and every consequence sits with a person, and the system is a filing cabinet with arithmetic.
Reorder pointScenarios
The stock position at which replenishment is triggered, calculated from demand across the lead time plus the cover held against variability in both. A figure set at item creation and never remeasured is a guess.
Resource classThe definition
One of the seven kinds of resource an enterprise plans: money, materials, people, capacity, time, information and the agents themselves. Maturity is assessed one class at a time, because a company is rarely at the same level in two of them.
ReversalGovernance
A defined procedure that undoes an action in the system that took it and carries its own record. A correction made by hand by whoever notices is an incident, not a reversal.

S

Safety stockScenarios
Stock held above expected demand to absorb variability in demand and in supply, sized against a stated service level, not against habit.
Segregation of dutiesGovernance
The control that no single actor both creates an obligation and settles it, so that a loss requires collusion. Where one system can do both, the separation has to be rebuilt between grants.
SubledgerScenarios
A detailed ledger for one class of transaction, such as payables, receivables or fixed assets, whose totals post to a single control account in the general ledger.
System of recordThe transition
The store treated as authoritative for a given fact, such as the ledger for balances or a subledger for its own transactions. That authority comes from being controlled, reconciled and signed, not from the software that holds it.

T

The loopThe loop
The six stages an autonomous system runs continuously, never in a batch: observe, interpret, plan, act, reconcile, adapt. A system that stops after acting has automated a task; it has not taken on a result.
Three way matchScenarios
The control that a supplier invoice is paid only where it agrees with the purchase order and the goods receipt on quantity, price and tax, inside a stated tolerance.
Time (resource class)The definition
Lead times, commitments, calendars and sequencing. Seldom treated as a resource, though every promise a company makes spends some of it.
ToleranceGovernance
The size of a difference a system may settle without raising it, such as the gap between an invoice and the order it answers. A tolerance nobody wrote down is a tolerance nobody set.
Trial balanceScenarios
The list of every account balance at a point in time, with debits equal to credits. It is what a close produces and what a reviewer reads first.

W

Work orderScenarios
An authorisation to build a stated quantity of an item, carrying the material issued to it, the operations it passes through and the quantity that survives each one.

Z

Zero balance sweepScenarios
A banking arrangement that moves the closing balance of each participating account into a header account daily, leaving every participant at its agreed target balance.

A term is citable for as long as its anchor holds, and these anchors hold.

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