The checklist that lied
You're in the ops studio. What you're doing this lesson: decide which checklist items a computer may finish, and which ones a named person must sign. A green tick that nobody did is worse than no checklist. You do not need the SOP lesson to start.
A warehouse team wires their recurring checklist into an automation. It's a good automation — it knows the cadences, it fires on schedule, it never forgets. Six months later an auditor asks who performed the forklift daily inspections in March. The checklist says they happened. Green ticks, every day.
Nobody inspected the forklift. The bot marked the item done because the item was due, and "due" and "done" had been wired to the same wire. The checklist didn't just fail to catch the miss — it manufactured evidence that there was no miss. That's strictly worse than having no checklist at all, and it's the failure this whole lesson exists to make impossible.
Some sign-offs are laws
For an ops lead, this isn't a philosophy question. The floor is statutory:
- Under OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration — the US workplace-safety regulator) recordkeeping rule (29 CFR 1904), covered employers must maintain the Form 300 log of work-related injuries and illnesses, post the 300A annual summary where employees can see it, and — depending on size and industry — submit the data to OSHA electronically, with annual submissions due March 2. Employees have the right to review the log. These are duties held by the employer and its named people.
- Under the General Duty Clause, the workplace must be kept free of recognized hazards — a duty that doesn't move onto whatever tool drafted or scheduled the procedure.
A script that auto-completes "post the 300A summary" hasn't discharged a duty. It has hidden the fact that nobody did. When the gap surfaces — audit, incident, lawsuit — the record your own automation faked is the first exhibit.
The line, drawn explicitly
So every recurring item gets classified, on purpose, before automation touches it:
- Auto-run — reversible, no duty, no dollar: regenerate the report draft, refresh the due list, compile the reorder suggestions. If it runs wrong, you rerun it. The machine may do these end to end.
- Named approval — a named person must mark it done. Anything with a legal duty, a signature, a safety act, or spend behind it: inspections, compliance postings, invoice approvals, anything that binds the company. The machine computes that it's due and routes it to that person. Only that person marks it done.
Here's the part that should annoy you: most tool tours leave the threshold implicit, as Lean tradition. The question is concrete — what a system may execute versus what needs a human, and who sets that line. You're about to encode it as a field in a data structure, which is where a threshold actually holds.
Next: the checklist as schedule data, with the line built in.