AI for operations managers, measured against work your desks already finished.

Operations is everything at once, by definition. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics describes general and operations managers as overseeing work too varied to sit in one area of management: they direct daily operations, plan how materials and people are used, set staff schedules and assign work. In a company that ships against customer orders, that adds up to throughput, on-time delivery, the backlog, the people on each desk, and the exceptions nobody else can settle. This page is for whoever carries that, whether the title is COO, VP or director of operations, or operations manager.

Desks keep a beat as well. The Lean Enterprise Institute defines takt time as available production time divided by customer demand, and its standardized work rests on three elements: takt, the sequence of the work, and the standard inventory that keeps a process running. It lists a baseline for improvement among the benefits. An order or dispatch desk has the same parts: documents arriving at the rate customers and suppliers send them, a sequence of checks for each one, and an inbox holding whatever is waiting.

The backlog is arithmetic. Little's Law, as John Little and Stephen Graves of MIT set it out, says that in a steady state the average number of items in a system equals their average arrival rate multiplied by the average time each spends there. Read for an inbox: what sits waiting is what arrives each day times how long each document waits. If arrivals hold steady, the queue only shrinks when the time per document does, so your success criteria can include how long a draft takes to be ready, not only whether it was right.

Your SOPs say what should happen. Your records say what did. ISO 9001:2015 folds documents and records into one term, documented information: documents describe what needs to be done and are maintained, while records describe what was done and are retained. (The 2026 edition came out in September, and 2015 certificates stay valid through the transition.) The test uses both. The desk's work instruction, where one exists, sets the rules, and the finished records are the answer key. Where the two disagree, your reviewer sees it on the scoring sheet.

The rest is in somebody's head. Clause 7.1.6 of the same standard asks a company to work out the knowledge its processes need, keep it, and have it available where and when it is needed. On a busy desk the exceptions live with the lead: the customer whose POs carry an old revision, the supplier whose certs come back late, the account that always wants a split shipment. That is why a desk lead reviews the test, and why the success criteria are written before it starts. Writing them down puts some of that knowledge on paper.

A sample with the changes in it. Clause 8.2.1 of ISO 9001:2015 counts enquiries, contracts and orders, changes included, as customer communication, and clause 8.2.4 asks that when requirements change, the related documents are amended and the people concerned are told. Revised POs, pulled-in dates, split releases and cancelled lines are where a desk earns its keep. Your reviewer picks the 20 to 30 documents, and a sample of clean first orders only would prove very little.

Scoring rows you would use for a person. Did the draft land the right customer, item, quantity and date? Did it mark what it could not settle from the document and the records you sent, with the reason beside it? Did it state anything the records don't support? How long until a person could approve it? You and the reviewer agree these before the first draft exists.

People stay where they are. The test runs on copies of finished work, so nobody on the desk changes how they work while it runs. During the live month, drafts reach a person who approves, corrects or rejects each one. Planners keep the schedule, buyers keep the suppliers and dispatch keeps the trucks.