The words behind the work, explained plainly.

A CRM is the system that holds everything about a customer relationship — who they are, every conversation, every quote, where the deal stands — so the relationship belongs to the business rather than to whoever happens to own the inbox.

See alsoERPSingle source of truthSystems integration

Data migration is moving existing records — customers, products, stock, open orders, balances — out of the systems and spreadsheets holding them today and into a new system, in a state the new system can actually use.

See alsoERP implementationGo-live

An ERP is a single system that runs the core parts of a business — sales, purchasing, inventory, production, finance and people — on one shared set of records, so a number entered once is the same number everywhere it appears.

See alsoERP implementationOdooSingle source of truth

ERP implementation is the work of moving a business onto an ERP: agreeing how each process should run, configuring the system to match, migrating the data, training the people who will use it, and staying until it actually runs the operation.

See alsoERPOdooStandard operating procedure

Go-live is the day a business starts running on a new system for real — the point at which the old system stops being the record and the new one starts.

See alsoERP implementationData migrationChange management

Odoo is an open-source business platform whose modules cover sales, inventory, manufacturing, accounting, HR and more, and which can be extended with custom modules — which is why it is usually chosen when a business needs its own processes rather than a fixed template.

See alsoERPERP implementation

An API is the defined way one piece of software asks another for data or asks it to do something — the documented door a system leaves open, so other systems do not have to guess or scrape.

See alsoSystems integrationBusiness process automation

Business process automation is having software carry out the repeatable steps of a business process — moving data, creating records, sending notifications, triggering the next action — so people are only involved where judgement is genuinely needed.

See alsoSystems integrationAPIStandard operating procedure

An integration layer is a piece of software that sits between your systems and handles the traffic between them, so each system connects to it once instead of connecting separately to every other system.

See alsoSystems integrationAPIData silo

Systems integration is connecting separate business systems so they exchange data directly, instead of a person exporting from one and importing into another.

See alsoAPIBusiness process automationData silo

A webhook is one system telling another that something just happened, the moment it happens, by sending a message to a URL you gave it in advance.

See alsoAPISystems integrationBusiness process automation

A hallucination is when an AI system states something false as if it were fact — an invented figure, a policy that does not exist, a citation to a document never written — with exactly the same confidence it uses when it is right.

See alsoLarge language modelRetrieval-augmented generationHuman in the loop

Human in the loop means a person reviews or approves what an automated system produces before it takes effect, with the system designed around that review rather than treating it as an optional extra.

See alsoHallucinationLarge language modelBusiness process automation

Intelligent document processing is using AI to read business documents — invoices, contracts, delivery notes, forms — and turn them into structured fields a system can act on, without a person retyping them.

See alsoRetrieval-augmented generationBusiness process automation

A large language model is a system trained on very large amounts of text to predict what text should come next, which is what lets it write, summarise, classify and answer — and also why it can produce something fluent and wrong.

See alsoHallucinationRetrieval-augmented generationHuman in the loop

Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique where an AI system first retrieves relevant passages from your own documents and then answers using them, so the answer is grounded in sources you can check rather than in the model's memory.

See alsoIntelligent document processingSingle source of truth

A dashboard is a screen showing the current state of a few things that matter, so someone can see how the business is doing without asking anyone or building a report.

See alsoKPISingle source of truthERP

A data silo is business information held in one team's system where the rest of the business cannot reach it, so answers that should be immediate require asking someone.

See alsoSingle source of truthSystems integration

Data sovereignty is the principle that data is subject to the laws of the country it is stored and processed in — which is why where your systems run is a legal question, not only a technical one.

See alsoLarge language modelRetrieval-augmented generationSingle source of truth

A KPI is a number chosen to stand for how well something is going, tracked over time so a change in it means something has changed in the business.

See alsoDashboardSingle source of truth

A single source of truth is an arrangement where each fact in a business — a stock level, a price, a customer address — is stored in exactly one authoritative place, and everywhere else reads it rather than keeping its own copy.

See alsoData siloERPSystems integration

Change management is the work of getting people to actually use a new system or process — training, communication, naming owners, and handling the resistance that comes from asking people to work differently.

See alsoERP implementationGo-liveStandard operating procedure

Reconciliation is checking that two records of the same thing agree — a bank statement against the ledger, a supplier invoice against what was received, counted stock against what the system says — and investigating the differences.

See alsoSingle source of truthBusiness process automationData silo

A standard operating procedure is a written definition of how a recurring task is done — the steps, who owns them, and what to do when something goes wrong — so the task does not depend on which person happens to run it.

See alsoBusiness process automationERP implementation