Sales forecasting
and inventory optimization
Become a retail mastermind you always wanted to be.
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Dictionary H
| Term | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Hague rules | Rules governing the carriage of goods by sea and identifying the rights and responsibilities of carriers and owners of cargo. These rules were published in 1924 following an international convention and were subsequently given the force of law by many maritime nations |
| Hamburg rules | Rules governing the rights and responsibilities of carrier and cargo interests which may be incorporated into a contract for the carriage of goods by sea either by agreement of the parties or statutorily. These rules were adopted by the United National Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea in 1978. |
| Hand (wheel) jack opening | Space provided in the bottom deck to allow pallet jack wheels to bear on the floor. |
| Hand truck | Refers to a type of fork truck that is powered but does not carry an operator. Often referred to as a walk behind fork truck. |
| Hand-held computer | Any portable computer that can be operated while holding it in one hand. |
| Hand-held scanner | A bar code reader that that is manually pointed at a bar code to read it. Most common are the wired pistol-shaped devices used in retail stores. Hand-held scanners can also be wireless. |
| Handling | A single pick-up, movement and set-down of a loaded or empty pallet. |
| Handling costs | The cost involved in moving, transferring, preparing, and otherwise handling inventory. |
| Harbour dues | Various local charges against all seagoing vessels entering a harbour, to cover maintenance of channel depths, buoys, lights, etc. All harbours do not necessarily have this charge |
| Harbour maintenance fees | Charges assessed to users for use of a harbour, used generally for maintenance of the harbour |
| Harbour master | A person usually having the experience of a certificated master mariner and having a good knowledge of the characteristics of the port and its whole area. He administers the entire shipping movements that take place in and within reach of the port he is responsible for. |
| Harbour tax | A tax paid quarterly by exporters to U.S. (and others) Customs based on a percentage of their total value of exports. |
| Hard aground | A vessel which has gone aground and is incapable of re-floating under her own power. |
| Hard copy | Computer output printed on paper. |
| Hard currency | A currency which is sound enough to be accepted internationally and which is usually fully convertible , currently this would include the US Dollar, British Pound and Euro, for example. |
| Hardened-steel nail | Heat-treated and tempered steel pallet nail with a MIBANT angle between 8 and 28 degrees. |
| Hardwood | Wood from broad-leaved species of trees (not necessarily hard or dense). |
| Harmonised code | An internationally accepted and uniform description system for classifying goods for customs, statistical, and other purposes |
| Harmonised System of Codes (HS) | An international goods classification system for describing cargo in international trade under a single commodity-coding scheme. Developed under the auspices of the Customs Cooperations Council (CCC), an international Customs organisation in Brussels, this code is a hierarchically structured product nomenclature containing approximately 5,000 headings and subheadings. It is organised into 99 chapters arranged in 22 sections. Sections encompass an industry (e.g., Section XI, Textiles and Textile Articles); chapters encompass the various materials and products of the industry (e.g., Chapter 50, Silk; Chapter 55, Manmade Staple Fibres; Chapter 57, Carpets). The basic code contains four-digit headings and six-digit subheadings. Many countries add digits for Customs tariff and statistical purposes. In the United States, duty rates will be the eight-digit level; statistical suffixes will be at the ten-digit level. The Harmonised System (HS) is the current U.S. tariff schedule (TSUSA) for imports and is the basis for the ten-digit Schedule B export code. |
| Harmonised tariff schedule | A comprehensive list of all products, classified according to their characteristics, and used to provide duty rate and statistical information |
| Hatch | The opening in the deck of a vessel; gives access to the cargo hold. |
| Hawser | Large strong rope used for towing purposes and for securing or mooring ships. Hawsers are now mostly made of steel |
| HAZ MAT | An industry abbreviation for “Hazardous Material.” |
| Hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) | A quality management system for effectively and efficiently ensuring farm to table food safety in the United States. HACCP regulations for various sectors are established by the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. |
| Hazard Class | Numerical designation of the primary transportation hazard based upon the chemical and physical properties of the hazardous chemical. For example, the hazard class assigned to acetone is 3, which corresponds to a flammable liquid. |
| Hazardous Material (HM): | A substance or material which has been determined by the Department of Transportation to be capable of posing an unreasonable risk to health, safety and property when transported in commerce. A complete listing of hazardous material can be found in 49 CFR 172.101. |
| HDPE | High Density Polyethylene |
| Headmount display | A wearable device that is positioned in front of one of the user’s eyes and projects a viewable image of a computer screen. |
| Heater Service | The protection of freezable shipments by heat. |
| Heavy-Lift Charge | A charge made for lifting articles too heavy to be lifted by a ship’s normal tackle. |
| Hedge inventory | A form of inventory buildup to buffer against some event that may not happen. Hedge inventory planning involves speculation related to potential labour strikes, price increases, unsettled governments, and events that could severely impair a company’s strategic initiatives. Risk and consequences are unusually high, and top management approval is often required. |
| Hedging | A strategy used by dealers in commodities, foreign exchange and securities, and by manufacturers and other producers to prevent loss due to price fluctuations |
| Heijunka | From Japanese. A method of levelling production, usually at the final assembly line, that makes just-in-time production possible. It involves averaging both the volume and sequence of different model types on a mixed model production line. Using this method avoids excessive batching of different types of product and volume fluctuations in the same product. Also see “production smoothing.” |
| Helical nail | Helically (continuous spiral) threaded pallet nail, see also drive screw nail. |
| Helix | A spiral-wound wire used as a hinge or attaching device. |
| Helm | A tiller or a wheel generally installed on the bridge or wheelhouse of a ship to turn the rudder during manoeuvring and navigation. It is in fact the steering wheel of the ship |
| Hierarchy of cost assignability | In cost accounting, an approach to group activity costs at the level of an organisation where they are incurred, or can be directly related to. Examples are the level where individual units are identified (unit-level), where batches of units are organised or processed (batch-level), where a process is operated or supported (process-level), or where costs cannot be objectively assigned to lower level activities or processes (facility-level). This approach is used to better understand the nature of the costs, including the level in the organisation at which they are incurred, the level to which they can be initially assigned (attached) and the degree to which they are assignable to other activity and/or cost object levels, i.e. activity or cost object cost, or sustaining costs. |
| High Cube | A trailer body with above average cubic content. |
| High performance computer | Computers with a Composite Theoretical Performance greater than 2000 Million Theoretical Operations Per Second |
| High rise shelving | Units in excess of certain high and serviced by rolling ladders or mechanical non-entry stock pickers. Normally tied together across the top over aisles. |
| High-density storage | Describes storage methods where unitised loads are stored more than one unit deep and/or high. Stacked bulk floor storage, drive-in/drive-thru rack, push-back rack, flow rack, and, to a lesser extent, double-deep rack, are examples of high-density storage. |
| High-piled combustible storage | Term used in fire codes to refer to codes relating to floor or racked storage exceeding 12 feet in height or high-hazard commodity storage exceeding 6 feet in height. |
| Highway use taxes | Taxes assessed by federal and state governments against users of the highway (the fuel tax is an example). They use tax money is used to pay for the construction, maintenance, and policing of highways. |
| Hi-low | Usually refers to a forklift truck on which the operator must stand rather than sit. |
| Hinged bridge | A hinged transition plate which is attached to the edge of the platform and used to bridge the gap between the platform and landing and/or truck bed. |
| Histogram | A graphic summary of variation in a set of data. The pictorial nature of a histogram lets people see patterns that are difficult to detect in a simple table of numbers. |
| Hitchment | The marrying of two or more portions of one shipment that originate at different locations, moving under one bill of lading, from one shipper to one consignee. |
| HMI | The Hoist Manufacturer’s Institute, an affiliate of Material Handling Industry, is a trade association of manufacturers of overhead handling hoists. The products of its member companies include hand chain hoists, ratchet lever hoists, trolleys, air chain and air rope hoists, and electric chain and electric wire rope hoists. |
| HMT | Harbour Maintenance Tax. |
| Hogshead | A large cask used for shipment of wines and spirits |
| Hoisting rope | Special flexible wire rope for lifting purposes, generally being of six strands with 19 wires in each strand and in most cases having a hemp rope at the centre |
| Hoists | A suspended machinery unit that is used for lifting or lowering a freely suspended (unguided) load. |
| Hold | A general name for the spaces below the main deck designated for stowage of general cargo. A hold on a tanker is usually just forward of #1 cargo tank. Some newer tankers have no hold |
| Hold for pickup | Freight to be held at the carrier’s destination location for the recipient to pick up |
| Hold harmless contract | An agreement by which one party accepts responsibility for all damages and other liability that may arise from a transaction, relieving the other party of any such liability. The contract provides complete indemnity |
| Hold without action | A designation placed on an export license to review the exporter’s application or shipment under consideration |
| Holder in due course | An individual or legal entity (holder) who possesses a negotiable instrument, document of title, or similar document, and who took possession for value, in good faith, and without notice of any other individual’s or legal entity’s claim or defence against the instrument or document |
| Honeycombing | The practice of removing merchandise in pallet load quantities where the space is not exhausted in an orderly fashion. This results in inefficiencies due to the fact that the received merchandise may not be efficiently stored in the space which is created by the honey-combing. 2. The storing or withdrawal or supplies in a manner that results in vacant space that is not usable for storage of other items. 3. Creation of unoccupied space resulting from withdrawal of unit loads. This is one of the major hidden costs of warehousing |
| Hook rotator | A motorised device that powers the rotation of the hook attached to the bottom block of a hoist. |
| Hopper Barge | A barge which loads material dumped into it by a dredger and discharges the cargo through the bottom. |
| Hopper cars | Rail cars that permit top loading and bottom unloading of bulk commodities; some hopper cars have permanent tops with hatches to provide protection against the elements. |
| Horizontal Carousels | As a storage device, a horizontal carousel consists of a fixed number of adjacent storage columns or bays that are mechanically linked to either an overhead or floor mounted drive mechanism to form a complete loop. |
| Horizontal export trading company | An export trading company that exports a range of similar or identical products supplied by a number of manufacturers or other producers |
| Horizontal play/Horizontal hub | This is a term for a function that cuts across many industries, usually defines a facility or organisation that is providing a common service. |
| Hoshin planning | Breakthrough planning. A Japanese strategic planning process in which a company develops up to four vision statements that indicate where the company should be in the next five years. Company goals and work plans are developed based on the vision statements. Periodic submitted audits are then conducted to monitor progress. Also see “value stream.” |
| Host system | The primary computer system. The computer system on which the primary database resides. |
| Hostler | An individual employed to move trucks and trailers within a terminal or warehouse yard area. |
| Hot Tag | A shipment requiring special handling to achieve earlier-than-normal delivery service. |
| House of quality | A product planning matrix, somewhat resembling a house, that is developed during quality function deployment and shows the relationship of customer requirements to the means of achieving these requirements. |
| House-to-House | See Door-to-Door. |
| House-to-Pier | Cargo loaded into a container by the shipper under shipper’s supervision. |
| Hovercraft | A vessel used for the transportation of passengers and cargo riding on a cushion of air formed under it. It is very manoeuvrable and is also amphibious |
| HR | See Human Resources |
| HTML | See HyperText Markup Language |
| Hub | A large retailer or manufacturer having many trading partners. 2) A reference for a transportation network as in “hub and spoke” which is common in the airline and trucking industry. For example, a hub airport serves as the focal point for the origin and termination of long-distance flights where flights from outlying areas are fed into the hub airport for connecting flights. 3) A common connection point for devices in a network. 4) A Web “hub” is one of the initial names for what is now known as a “portal”. It came from the creative idea of producing a website, which would contain many different “portal spots” (small boxes that looked like ads, with links to different yet related content). This content, combined with Internet technology, made this idea a milestone in the development and appearance of websites, primarily due to the ability to display a lot of useful content and store one’s preferred information on a secured server. The web term “hub” was replaced with portal |
| Hub airport | An airport that serves as the focal point for the origin and termination of long-distance flights; flights from outlying areas are fed into the hub airport for connecting flights. |
| Hull | Shell or body of a ship. |
| Human resources | The function broadly responsible for personnel policies and practices within an organisation. |
| Human-machine interface | Any point where data is communicated from a worker to a computer or from a computer to a worker. Data entry programs, inquire programs, reports, documents, LED displays, and voice commands are all examples of human-machine interfaces. |
| Humping | The process of connecting a moving rail car with a motionless rail car within a rail classification yard in order to make up a train. |
| Hundred Weight | A statement of weight meaning 100 pounds, abbreviated CWT. |
| Hundredweight pricing | Special pricing for multiple piece shipments travelling to one destination that are rated on the total weight of the shipment (usually over 100 pounds) as opposed to rating on a per package basis |
| Hybrid inventory system | An inventory system combining features of the fixed reorder quantity inventory model and the fixed reorder cycle inventory model. Features of the fixed reorder cycle inventory model and the fixed reorder quantity inventory model can be combined in many different ways. For example, in the order point-periodic review combination system, an order is placed if the inventory level drops below a specified level before the review date; if not, the order quantity is determined at the next review date. Another hybrid inventory system is the optional replenishment model. Also see: Fixed Reorder Cycle Inventory Model, Fixed Reorder Quantity Inventory Model, Optional Replenishment Model |
| Hybrid truck | Material handling vehicle which crosses several categories, in function, in power source, etc. |
Sales forecasting
and inventory optimization
Become a retail mastermind you always wanted to be.