How to use OPERATION in Business Rules?

I'm currently working on the personalizations for the Positions page (My Client Groups > Positions), but the interesting thing about this page is that adding a position, correcting a position, updating a position and duplicating a position share the same business rules.

If I hadn't been paying attention I would have ended up overwriting data unintentionally due to the defaulting rules still taking effect even when updating a position.

Checking if the effective start date is null or not helps, but is handling stuff like this the intention behind the OPERATION field in business rules? If so, is it possible to get an example of how it would be used? (it doesn't return any field values once you start typing for it).