The SOP is data — get the process out of Vera's head without letting the model invent it — step 6 of 8

The diff is the change control

You just watched a diff catch something a rewrite would have smuggled through: the deletion of the one-at-a-time requeue rule. That's the whole argument for change control in one - line. When a process changes as an in-place edit, the old truth just evaporates — nobody approves the deletion because nobody sees it. When it changes as a diff, the deletion has to stand there and defend itself.

So every SOP change in this chapter ships the same way:

1. The version bumps. Same version, different steps is a lie waiting for an incident review. If the content moved, the number moves.
2. A named reviewer approves — and it isn't the drafter. Self-review is no review; the person who proposed dropping step 3 is the person least likely to notice why step 3 mattered. One name in the reviewer field, different from the name in drafter. The lint can check that mechanically, and yours will.
3. Safety-touching steps get a safety review, explicitly. That new step 5 — flagging hazmat orders for the safety owner — isn't decoration. Under the OSH Act's General Duty Clause, the employer must keep the workplace free of recognized hazards, and that duty sits with humans no matter what drafted the procedure. An AI-written SOP that omits a safety step moves nothing off the SOP's owner. So the review question is asked out loud every time: does any changed step touch a hazard or a recordkeeping duty? Writing down "no" counts. Skipping the question doesn't.

Why bother, in numbers you can take to your boss

The evidence on AI in operations points one direction, and it isn't "buy a tool." A July 2025 Gartner survey of 1,973 managers found business units that redesign how work gets done with AI are twice as likely to exceed revenue goals. Meanwhile MIT's 2025 GenAI Divide study found 95% of enterprise genAI pilots delivered no measurable P&L impact — with the value that did materialize concentrated where workflows were actually redesigned. (That study counts P&L only, so efficiency gains are undercounted; the direction survives the caveat.)

Redesign means changing SOPs. Changing SOPs without change control means every improvement is also a chance to silently delete the step that was load-bearing. The diff-plus-named-reviewer loop is what lets you change processes fast without changing them blind — which is the actual competitive skill, per the only large-sample evidence anyone has.

Next two steps: you build the lint, then the full release gate that puts all of this — provenance, verification, version bump, reviewer independence, safety review — in front of every v-next.