The words the repair industry uses.

All terms

ITADIT Asset Disposition

The controlled process of retiring IT equipment so that data is destroyed, value is recovered and disposal is documented.

WEEEWaste Electrical and Electronic Equipment

The EU directive that makes producers responsible for collecting and treating electrical and electronic equipment at end of life.

ESPR & Digital Product PassportEcodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation

The EU framework that sets ecodesign requirements per product group and attaches a machine-readable Digital Product Passport to each item.

EPRExtended Producer Responsibility

The principle that makes producers financially and operationally responsible for their products once consumers are done with them.

AGEC lawLoi anti-gaspillage pour une économie circulaire

The French circular-economy law that introduced the repairability index, the durability index and a wave of new producer-responsibility obligations.

Right to RepairDirective (EU) 2024/1799

The EU directive obliging manufacturers to repair certain products at a reasonable price and within a reasonable time, including after the legal guarantee has expired.

Device grading

The standardised assessment that assigns a used device a cosmetic and functional condition, driving its price and its route through the workshop.

Repair yield

The share of devices entering a workshop that leave it working and saleable, instead of being scrapped or harvested for parts.

Erasure certificate

The auditable record proving that all data on a specific device was destroyed, by a named method, at a known date.

Chain of custody

The unbroken, documented record of who held a device, when, and what was done to it, from collection to final disposition.

Reverse logistics

The flow that moves goods backwards | from the user toward collection, inspection, repair, resale or recycling.

Refurbished vs. remanufactured

Refurbishing restores a specific device to working, saleable condition; remanufacturing rebuilds units to an as-new specification, usually with interchangeable parts.

R2v3Responsible Recycling, version 3

The SERI certification standard for electronics reuse and recycling facilities, covering data security, environment, health and safety.

SOPStandard Operating Procedure

A written, versioned instruction that defines how one operation is performed, so any trained technician produces the same result.

Data sanitisation

Rendering the data on a storage device unrecoverable, by one of three methods with different levels of assurance.

WEEELABEXWEEE Label of Excellence

The European standard and certification scheme for the collection, sorting, storage, transport, preparation for reuse and treatment of electrical and electronic waste.

e-Stewards

A certification for electronics recyclers and ITAD operators built around strict environmental, export and labour requirements.

Eco-modulation

Adjusting the fee a producer pays into an EPR scheme according to how repairable, durable or recyclable the product is.

Repairability index

A score displayed at the point of sale rating how easily a product can be repaired, introduced in France and now being folded into a broader durability score.

Triage

The intake decision that routes each incoming device toward repair, parts harvesting, direct resale or recycling.

Parts harvesting

Recovering working components from devices that cannot be economically repaired, to supply the repair of others.

First-time fix rate

The share of repairs that pass final quality control on the first attempt, without rework or a second pass.

Trade-inalso: buyback

The mechanism by which a user hands back a used device, usually against a credit, feeding it into a refurbishment flow.

Device-as-a-ServiceDaaS

Providing devices to an organisation as a subscription, not a purchase, with the provider retaining ownership and taking them back at end of term.

ISO 9001Quality management systems - Requirements

The international standard that sets out what a quality management system has to contain, and the one most industrial customers ask their suppliers to be certified against.

PDCAPlan-Do-Check-Act, or the Deming cycle

The four-step improvement loop - plan a change, run it, measure what happened, then standardise or start again - that underpins most quality management systems.

CAPACorrective and Preventive Action

The formal handling of a problem: contain it, find why it happened, fix the cause, and verify the fix worked.

Non-conformityalso: nonconforming output

Anything that fails to meet a requirement - a device, a process step, or the management system itself - together with what was decided about it.

Management reviewISO 9001 clause 9.3

The periodic review in which top management looks at whether the quality system is still working, using a defined list of inputs, and decides what changes.

Skills matrixISO 9001 clause 7.2, competence

A map of who is qualified to do what, at what level, with the evidence behind each qualification.

Audit trailalso: audit log

A chronological record of who did what, when, and to which record - kept so that it can be checked later and not quietly altered.

MES vs ERPManufacturing Execution System vs Enterprise Resource Planning

Two layers of software that are often confused: the ERP plans and accounts for the business, the MES runs and records what happens on the shop floor.

WMSWarehouse Management System

The system that knows where physical items are inside a building and directs the movements between those locations.

RMAReturn Merchandise Authorisation

The reference issued when a customer is authorised to send an item back, and the case file that then follows that return.

IMEIInternational Mobile Equipment Identity

The fifteen-digit number that identifies a mobile device on cellular networks - distinct from the manufacturer serial number, and not interchangeable with it.

BOMBill of Materials

The structured list of components that make up an item - read forwards in manufacturing, and backwards in dismantling.

MCPModel Context Protocol

An open protocol that lets an AI assistant connect to external tools and data sources through one common interface instead of a bespoke integration each time.

RAGRetrieval-Augmented Generation

Answering a question by first retrieving relevant passages from your own documents, then generating the answer from those passages rather than from the model memory.