Glossary

Bid engineering and document review glossary

Plain definitions for the people who answer tenders and review supplier documents. Bid-engineering terms first, then the document AI terms behind the tools.

A

Defined term

AI Hallucination

A false or unsupported AI answer that sounds plausible but is not grounded in the source material.

Defined term

Audit Trail

A record of who accessed, changed, queried, or acted on documents and outputs inside a system.

C

Defined term

Confidence Score

A numerical measure of how certain an AI system is about its output.

Defined term

Cross-Document Analysis

Using AI to compare, connect, and synthesize information across multiple documents instead of treating each file in isolation.

Defined term

Compliance Matrix

A table that lists every requirement in a specification or tender, one row each, and states whether and how the offer meets it.

D

Defined term

Document AI

The use of AI to read, extract, understand, and act on information inside documents.

Defined term

Document Understanding

AI's ability to interpret what a document means, not only what text appears on the page.

Defined term

Deviations and Clarifications

The section of a bid that lists where the offer departs from the specification (deviations) and where it explains or qualifies a requirement (clarifications).

G

Defined term

Ground Truth

The verified correct answer used to train and evaluate AI systems.

Defined term

Governing-Document Precedence

The rule that decides which document wins when the requisition, project specification, datasheet, owner standard and industry standards disagree.

H

Defined term

Human-in-the-Loop

Combining AI automation with human oversight for quality control and exception handling.

Defined term

Heat Number Traceability

The unbroken chain that links each pressure-retaining part to the steel melt it was made from, through the heat number on the part and its material certificate.

I

Defined term

Intelligent Document Processing

AI-powered document automation that classifies files, extracts data, and routes work without relying only on manual review or fixed templates.

Defined term

Information Extraction

Using AI to pull structured, usable facts out of unstructured or semi-structured documents.

Defined term

Inspection and Test Plan (ITP)

A document that lists each inspection and test during manufacture, the acceptance criteria, the records produced and who must witness or review each step.

L

Defined term

Layout Analysis

Detecting and understanding document structure including regions, columns, tables, and reading order.

M

Defined term

Material Requisition (MR)

The EPC or owner document that defines what equipment is to be bought and lists every specification, datasheet and standard that applies.

Defined term

Manufacturing Record Book (MRB)

The supplier's indexed file of quality records for one equipment order, handed over at the end to prove it was made, inspected and tested as ordered.

O

Defined term

Optical Character Recognition

Technology that turns scanned images or image-based PDFs into machine-readable text.

P

Defined term

PDF Parsing

Extracting text, structure, and content from PDF documents for processing.

Q

Defined term

Question Answering

AI that answers natural-language questions using document content rather than only returning search results or extracted fields.

R

Defined term

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

A pattern that retrieves relevant document context before a language model answers, so the output is grounded in source material instead of memory alone.

Defined term

Recall and Precision

Metrics measuring AI's ability to find all relevant items (recall) and avoid false positives (precision).

Defined term

Requirements Traceability Matrix (RTM)

A table from systems and software engineering that links each requirement to the design, tests and documents that prove it was met.

S

Defined term

Semi-Structured Data

Data with some organizational properties but not rigid schema, like invoices and forms.

T

Defined term

Table Extraction

Automatically detecting and extracting structured data from tables in documents.

Defined term

Technical Deviation List

The table a bidder submits with its offer listing every point where the offered equipment differs from the client's technical specification.

Defined term

Technical Bid Evaluation (TBE)

The buyer's review of each bidder's technical offer against the requisition and specifications, before commercial comparison.

Defined term

Technical Query (TQ)

A written technical question raised by a bidder or evaluator that needs a formal answer before an offer can be completed or accepted.

Defined term

Table of Compliance

A clause-by-clause statement, often required by the tender, in which the bidder declares compliance or non-compliance with each requirement.

U

Defined term

Unstructured Data

Information that doesn't follow a predefined format, like text documents, emails, and images.

V

Defined term

Vendor Data Requirements List (VDRL)

In engineering procurement, the list of documents a vendor must deliver for an equipment order, with when each is due and whether the buyer must review it.

W

Defined term

Workflow Automation

Automating business processes that involve documents, decisions, and handoffs.

Defined term

Welding Procedure Specification (WPS), Procedure Qualification Record (PQR) and Welder Performance Qualification (WPQ)

The three welding records behind every production weld: the procedure the welder follows, the test that proves the procedure works, and the test that proves the welder can apply it.