Idioms of Business & Technology English

From the point of view of the buyer, there is no real difference between price and cost.  From the point of view of the seller, there is a huge difference.

When a buyer asks, “How much does it cost?” or “What is the price?” the expected answer is usually the same to both questions.  It is the amount of money the buyer must hand over to the seller to purchase the goods or services.

When the seller asks, “How much does it cost?” the real question is probably “How much did it cost me to make this available to sell?”  This could be the price the supplier charged a retailer or even the cost of providing a service.

When the seller asks, “What is the price?” the real question is probably “How much am I going to charge a customer?” or in the case of professional services “How much will I charge the client?”

The difference between price and cost from the seller’s point of view is the profit.  In the case of selling a product, profit equals the price charged minus the cost of acquiring the product.   In the case of providing a service, profit equals the price charged minus the cost of providing the service.  The cost of providing the service is often the “burdened” cost of labor to the service provider.  Burdened labor cost would include the cost of any payroll taxes and employee benefits which are on top of the employee’s compensation.

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This podcast defines and explains several terms which are often used when describing a technology solution, its performance, its reliability, and how it prepares a company for some future change.   Here’s a high-level summary of the content.  A full transcript is available to paid subscribers.  Just click the “Contact” link under my picture on the blog at http://premiumenglish.podbean.com/

• High availability
• “Single Point of Failure”.
• Clustering
• High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP)
• Hot Spare
• Cold Spare
• Scalability
• Maintainability
• Flexibility
• Inflexible, Brittle

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For this episode I thought I would define some of the phrases and acronyms you are likely to hear if you find yourself working for a manufacturing company or a vendor supplying goods to a manufacturing company. You might also run into these words, phrases, and acronyms if you work for a dealer, distributor, or retailer that buys manufactured products for resale.

The acronym “PO” is short for Purchase Order. This is an authorization from a buyer to buy a certain quantity of goods at a particular price. (A PO could also be used to buy services but we’ll ignore that for now.) It would also specify where the goods are to be delivered. Usually there is a “purchase order number” or “PO Number” provided which the vendor is supposed to include on any future correspondence with the buyer. Purchase orders may be sent by mail, fax, electronic data interchange (EDI), or sometimes by email attachment.

When a purchase order is sent electronically, the supplier often replies with their own electronic message called a “PO Acknowledgement” to let the buyer know the order was received and the supplier has accepted the order.

You should be aware that when a vendor receives a purchase order from a buyer, the vendor may indeed turn around and issue purchase orders of their own to their suppliers. This linkage between suppliers to other suppliers who are in turn suppliers to a large manufacturing company is often called the “supply chain” by the manufacturer.

The buyer may occasionally need to alter a purchase order. They may, for example, need to alter the desired delivery date or shipping address. This type of transaction is often called a “PO Change” or “PO Change Request”.

The buyer may periodically issue an electronic message to the supplier requesting “Order Status”. The buyer may be concerned because a long time has passed with no word from the supplier, because only a portion of a large order has been delivered, or because the buyer’s inventory levels are low. The supplier will reply with the status using terms such as “shipped” to indicate the goods are on the way or “backordered” to indicate the supplier is out of stock and they are not sure when they will be able to fill the order.

The information technology systems of some manufacturing companies are sophisticated enough they are able to track the expected delivery of all components and raw materials they need to produce a product. They use this information to predict when everything required will be available that they can predict the date in the future when the product can be shipped (and maybe also when it can be delivered). They call this the “available to promise date” and this is used instead of saying that a product is “on backorder.”

“ASN” is short for Advance Shipping Notice. An ASN is used so that the buyer will know when to expect delivery from the supplier. This is helpful since the buyer might need to arrange to have a crew available to unload the goods. In the case of a retail buyer, the goods need to be put into inventory for sale. In the case of a manufacturer buyer, the goods may be moved immediately to the assembly line. ASNs are usually provided in situations in which the buyer uses electronic messages to manage their supply chain. Usually the ASN would reference the purchase order number as mentioned above.

Some buyers allow suppliers to make partial deliveries of their order. Some customers specify in the purchase order that delivery be spread over a specified time table. For example, the buyer may want the supplier to deliver 100 items per week. Often the supplier will refer to a partial delivery as a “release” against a purchase order. There may be several “releases” until the entire quantity that was ordered has been delivered.

An “invoice” is the itemized bill from the supplier to the buyer showing the agreed upon price, quantity delivered, taxes, shipping charges, and the total amount of money the buyer owes the supplier. Somewhere on the invoice, the supplier will put the buyer’s purchase order number as a reference so that the buyer can reconcile that the prices and quantities of goods match the buyer’s original agreement as specified in the buyer’s purchase order. Invoices may be sent by mail, fax, or electronic message.

In some manufacturing industries, a buyer will collaborate with their suppliers by sending the suppliers a “forecast” of how much they anticipate buying from the supplier over a period of time in the near future. This is done so that suppliers can make sure they can have adequate supply available to ship when the buyer issues a purchase order in the future. Buyers will periodically update their forecast (perhaps weekly) to adjust their manufacturing to inventory levels and market demands.

Thanks for your support of Idioms of Business & Technology. If you would like to suggest a topic for this podcast, please visit http://premiumenglish.podbean.com/ and either leave a comment on one of the blog posts or click the “contact” link directly under my picture.

This Podcast is Copyright 2007 by Philip Hartman, All Rights Reserved

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This episode of Idioms of Business & Technology focuses on three words that I hear used over and over again in both business and technology settings but these words have multiple, distinct meanings. I hope to provide the context you will need to tell which meaning was intended.

The first word is “client”.

• In the context of providing professional services such as legal advice, accounting, or technology consulting, a “client” is the person or company that is paying for the services provided. A client may be someone who asks a lawyer to prepare their will, a business executive that hires an auditor, or a business executive that hires a management consultant to improve a manufacturer’s supply chain operations.
• In the context of computer software, a “client” is a software program which requests information or service from another program. In this case the other program plays the role of “server” in that it serves the client. You may also hear the phrase “client/server architecture” which describes a relationship between a client (or potentially many clients) and a centralized server.
• In the context of one of the most popular corporate software packages in the world, SAP, a “client” is also a computer security concept in which several companies can run on a single SAP installation using the same database hardware. When users log into SAP they must specify which “client” they want to log into. SAP makes sure that no data from one client is mixed up with the data from another client. This practice originally started because of a business practice which began as our first example of a client, that of someone who hires professional services firm. A “client” hired a company to provide SAP software to them as a service. The services firm sold services to many clients and ran them all on the same database. The concept of specifying an SAP client when a user logged onto the system provided a way to keep one client’s users from seeing data belonging to another client.

The next word I would like to discuss is the verb “engage” or its noun form “engagement”. There is also the adjective “engaged”.

• In our personal life, to become “engaged” usually means that a woman has accepted a man’s proposal to get married. It would also apply if the woman asks the man and he accepts. In either case, the man and the woman are “engaged” from the time both agree until the marriage takes place. The period of time between becoming engaged and the time of the marriage is the “engagement” period. A couple who is engaged for 12 months is said to have had a 12 month engagement.
• Another commonly used use of the verb “engage” is to devote attention to someone such as “He was engaged in a serious conversation with his boss.”
• A slight variation on this would be the military use of the phrase to “engage the enemy” which would mean to confront the enemy directly.
• In the business world, people often use the word “engaged” to mean taking an issue or problem very seriously. Often it is used in a negative way to ask if someone who should take an issue seriously really is. For example, “Is the Vice President of Marketing engaged on this customer service issue?” or “The Vice President is not engaged at all.”
• Earlier in this episode we mentioned the hiring of a professional services firm. Often the project that consultants are working on or the contract that consultants work under is called an “engagement”. For example, a technology consultant might say to another “I am working on an engagement with XYZ Company to determine the requirements for their new supply chain software.”

The last word for this episode is “abstract” or “abstraction.” These are popular words in the areas of software design and management consulting.

• To most people “abstract” is a way to describe modern art in which the painter or sculptor does not represent the subject as we see it with our physical eyes but presents lines, shapes, and colors in an interesting or thought provoking way.
• Sometimes people use abstract to imply something is difficult to understand such as an “abstract idea.”
• In software or consulting, an “abstraction” is something which pulls together essential concepts or data or system behavior in a way that helps facilitate discussion on an important topic. This is a paradox compared to the previous thought that something abstract is hard to understand. In consulting, abstractions are used to make something easier to understand. For example, a business concept such as a “customer” could be considered an abstraction if there are many different kinds of customers such as an individual, a small business, a government organization, a non-profit organization, or a large corporation. Even employees can be customers thru the popular employee purchase programs. All these customer types have common attributes such as names, addresses, and preferred methods of payment. Using the customer abstraction allows the conversation to focus on what is common while ignoring the fact that a non-profit needs a tax exemption certificate number or that a large corporation may lease instead of purchase or that an employee may receive an employee discount. In these cases it would be appropriate to call “customer” an abstraction while an “individual” and a “large corporation” are called “concrete” examples the customer abstraction.

This episode was pretty intense. I hope you learned something that will assist you in your work. Thanks again for subscribing to Idioms of Business and Technology!

Copyright 2007 by Philip Hartman, All rights reserved.

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Hi! My name is Phil Hartman and I’d like to welcome you to the first episode of my “Idioms of Business & Technology” podcast.

I would first like to thank you subscribing and making this investment to improve your English skills. I am committed to helping you understand the unusual idioms and figures of speech that native speakers may use during a business meeting, at a PowerPoint presentation, while brainstorming in a conference room, or speaking in the hallway at a technical conference. I’m interested in the way we use English which just can’t be taken literally and looked up in a simple dictionary.

You may still be wondering, however, “Why Should I Listen to Phil?” Let me try to reassure you.

• I am a native English language speaker from the US

• I am a successful consultant who helps major corporate clients with business and technology issues

– As a consultant, I have to communicate well to get clients to accept my recommendations and fund my projects

– I have worked for US-based clients in the US, Canada, India, and China.

• I have over 26 years of professional experience in government, business, and technology.

• I trust my experience makes up for the fact I have no formally recognized training in teaching English as a second language. I tell you what I use and hear used in everyday use by working professionals.

• I also have strong academic credentials backing up my business and technology expertise

– I have a Master of Science from the Johns Hopkins University and a

– Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Memphis State University

At this point i would also like to recommend that you consider reading the text transcript of the audio which is posted on the accompanying blog. This way you can also grasp the spelling of the words and the use of punctuation.

As my first idiom, I will discuss the phrase “There is more than one way to skin a cat.”

I am in some software training in Atlanta this week and the instructor used this phrase in class this morning. He said there were three different transactions which could be used to accomplish the same purpose. He then used the idiom “There is more than one way to skin the cat.” In other words, there is more than one way provided in the software to do the same thing

Taken literally, the phrase “more than one way to skin a cat” instantly creates a mental picture of someone being very cruel to a harmless cat. I used Google to search the Internet and I found one web page which suggested this idiom was really a reference to skinning catfish before cooking them. For anyone who doesn’t know, catfish have long whiskers similar to a cat’s whiskers.

Thanks again for your support of “Idioms of Business & Technology” podcast. There are more unusual English phrases to come!

This podcast is Copyright 2007 by Philip Hartman

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