A labour figure sourced from somebody else’s tool
A rival’s case study reports an eighteen percent labour cost and credits another rota product for it. A result measured elsewhere is not a feature.
Reading one rival’s site for its rota cell, the word labour turned up exactly where you would hope: in a case study, beside a number. A venue reports a labour cost of eighteen percent. Underneath the figure, in small text, is the source, and the source is a rota product that is not the rival’s. The rota cell in our table stayed blank, and this post is about why a number on a page is not the same as a feature on it.
Outcomes and features
A case study is a venue telling the story of a good year, and a good year has many causes. The ordering system is one. The rota tool that measured the labour percentage is another. The chef is probably a third. When a case study prints a result, the honest thing to ask is which product produced the number, and this one answers the question itself: the labour figure came from the other tool. The rival’s product may have helped the venue need fewer staff on the floor, which is a fair thing for the case study to imply. It did not schedule those staff, clock them in, or compute the eighteen percent, and nothing on any of their pages says it did.
So the rota cell means what every cell means: does their own site describe doing this? For rotas, clocking in and labour cost the answer is no, and the one place the subject appears credits somebody else. Writing a half on the strength of a footnote would be attributing another company’s feature to them, which is a strange kind of generosity and still a wrong table.
How to read a case study
Operators read case studies to find a venue like theirs. That is the right use. The wrong use is reading them as a feature list, because a case study reports everything that went well, including things the product did not do. Three questions sort it out. Did the product do this, or did it happen while the product was in use? Who is credited for the number? And does a feature page anywhere on the site describe the thing the case study is hinting at? If the answers are the second, somebody else, and no, you have found a result and not a feature, and your table should say so.