| Vendor-Managed Inventory | Used to describe the process of a supplier managing the inventory levels and purchases of the materials he supplies. This process can be very low tech, such as an office supplies supplier or maintenance supplies supplier coming into your facility once per week to visually check stock levels and place a re-supply order, or high tech, such as an electronic component supplier having remote access to your inventory management and MRP system and producing and automatically shipping to meet your production schedule. Vendor-managed inventory reduces internal costs associated with planning and procuring materials and enables the vendor to better manage his inventory through higher visibility to the supply chain. Vendor-managed inventory may be owned by the vendor (consignment inventory) or the customer. |
| Very Narrow Aisle | Lift trucks that operate in aisles less than six feet and often use guidance systems (wire, rail, or optical) to travel within the aisles. Types of VNA trucks include order selectors, swing mast, pivot, mast, and turret trucks. |
| VMI | See Vendor-Managed Inventory |
| VSAT | Very Small Aperture Terminal - an earthbound station used in satellite communications of data, voice, and video signals, excluding broadcast television. A VSAT consists of two parts, a transceiver that is placed outdoors in direct line-of-sight to the satellite and a device (Personal Earth Station, PES) that is placed indoors to interface the transceiver with the end user's communications device, such as a PC. The transceiver receives or sends a signal to a satellite transponder. The satellite sends and receives signals from a ground station computer that acts as a hub for the system. Each end user is interconnected with the hub station via the satellite, forming a star topology. The hub controls the entire operation of the network. For one end user to communicate with another, each transmission has to first go to the hub station that then re-transmits it via the satellite to the other end user's VSAT. Sometimes known as a private dedicated connection via satellite. |