What we install
The Operating Standard is standard work for your knowledge work.
It’s the written, current record of how your company does its work, kept in files your company owns. Your people work from it, and so does every AI tool we set up. Around it we install Skills and Champions, and if you want it after the handoff, Cadence, our ongoing support.
- Owner
- Your company
- Format
- Plain, readable files
- Read by
- Your people and your AI tools
- AI vendor
- Not tied to one
How it fits together
Four parts, built up from the Standard
On a plant floor, standard work is the current best way to do a job. Everyone follows it, and it gets revised on purpose. The Operating Standard does the same for quotes, prints, orders and reports, and the other three parts put it to work and keep it current.
Operating Standard
It’s a private record of how your company does its work, with one file per process, customer and supplier quirks, the words your people use, decisions and the reasons for them, and each process’s baseline next to what changed after. It points to your live systems instead of copying them, and your people and your AI tools read it before they act.
Skills
Skills are plain written instructions any capable AI can run. Each Skill covers one process: what goes in, the steps, the checks, what comes out, and where a person reviews the result. It’s stored next to the written process it automates, and when either changes, the other is updated in the same sitting. Every Skill has a written process behind it, and no result gets claimed without a baseline for how that process ran before.
Champions
One or two named people inside your company own the system. They’re trained while it’s built and tested at the handoff, and the test is whether they can add a process and change an automation without calling us. If we built your website, the same people usually keep it current too.
Cadence
Cadence is our ongoing support after the handoff, and it’s optional. You can keep it as a monthly arrangement for reviewing measurements, fixing things when models or document formats change, training and new work. It’s month to month, and if you cancel, everything keeps working.
Four properties
What makes it a Standard
A folder of documents describes the work once. These four rules keep the Standard true after that, and every sheet follows them.
Every line names its source.
Each line says where it came from: the print, the customer’s email, the owner’s rule. A line with no source is marked unknown instead of guessed.
Every line carries the date someone last checked it.
Each line shows when someone last checked it, so a rule confirmed last week is easy to tell from one nobody has looked at in a year.
Updating it is part of doing the work.
When a process changes, the person changing it updates the Standard in the same sitting, so keeping it current doesn’t turn into a separate job.
When the record and reality disagree, reality wins.
The record is fixed the same day, and the fix is dated like everything else.
Read the example sheet as a table
| Step | Key point | Reason | Source | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10. Check print rev against BOM rev | Revs must match | A stale rev is scrap | Print; BOM | 2026-09-14 |
| 20. Confirm material cert on file | Cert meets spec | The spec requires it | Cert file | 2026-09-14 |
| 30. Attach current work instruction | Latest rev only | Same setup each time | Doc control | 2026-09-02 |
| 40. Flag what no rule covers | Ask; never guess | Judgment stays human | Owner rule | 2026-08-28 |
Illustrative example. The rows are made up and describe no real company.
Ownership
Your company owns all of it
The Operating Standard, the Skills, the code and the accounts belong to your company, and we’re never the owner.
- Everything sits in your company’s own accounts, with at least two of your own people as owners.
- Passwords live in your company’s password manager, never in documents or AI chats.
- We get the access the work needs. It’s listed, and you can remove it.
- You can cancel Cadence any month, and everything keeps working.
Swap the AI; the Standard stays.
The Standard and the Skills are plain written files, so they don’t depend on any one AI company. When a better model comes along, you can move to it and keep everything you built. We count a switch as done only after the whole process has been tested end to end on the new model.
How the work is split
The model reads and drafts. Code decides. People approve.
Each part of a job goes to whatever does it most reliably.
Reads and drafts
It reads the documents, pulls out what matters, and writes a first draft, with each value traced back to where it came from. Anything unclear goes to a person.
Decides
Exact rules, arithmetic, lookups and comparisons run in ordinary code that gives the same answer every time. A model shouldn’t be doing math that plain software gets right.
Approve
A person checks the result wherever it matters. Anything that can’t be undone, like a quote going out or a job being released, waits for that person, and anything no rule covers comes to them instead of being guessed.
Compared with
How it differs from a binder, a chatbot or a platform you rent
- A binder of SOPs. A binder gets written once and goes on a shelf. The Standard is what your people and your AI tools work from, and it’s corrected the day it’s wrong.
- A chatbot. Your people can ask it a question and get an answer that names its source, and the same record drives the processes built on it, like a quote drafted from your past jobs or a print checked against the BOM.
- A platform you rent. There’s no subscription to us holding it up. It’s files and code in your accounts, and it stays there whether or not you keep working with us.
Conversations are always free.
Tell us about a process your people know by heart that nobody has written down, and we’ll talk through what the first sheet of your Standard would hold.