Just My Cup of Tea

Can a chart about desserts inspire Shannon to find a solution for her physical therapy practice?

“Tables that update themselves!” Shannon’s voice came from behind Mike as she brought cups of tea to the table where he was working.

“Like in the fairy tale?” Mike asked, half his attention on the screen of his laptop. “Where the boy tells the table to spread itself and it’s covered with food?”

Mike looked up and took a mug. “Or,” he said, “in this case, tea.”

“This tea didn’t make itself,” Shannon assured her husband. “But did you make all those charts yourself?”

Mike looked back at the computer screen. “What, my dashboard? No, this is the software I use to run the restaurant. What are you talking about, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Just today I was telling my office manager that we needed tables that updated themselves. Are those charts on your computer automatically drawn from the information in the restaurant’s books?”

“The books, plus the customer database, the reservations schedules, the inventory” There’s too much data to keep track of without automation. This gives me a visual interface so I can see pretty quickly what’s going on at the restaurant.”

“When we were talking about KPIs, you didn’t mention this,” Shannon observed.

“I have a few numbers that I track as they happen,” Mike agreed, “but I told you my accounting software generates reports for me. I was checking them when you kindly brought me this cup of tea.”

“You keep your accounting software on your laptop?”

“I keep it in the cloud, along with the rest of the management software I use. It’s all integrated, and if I have time in the evening to sort out some question or to get a quarterly report ready, I can pull it up at any internet connection.”

“Must be great if you’re stuck in an airport.”

“You know it.” Mike took Shannon’s hand. “I’m not sure that this particular software would work for you, but there’s bound to be a program that’ll do what you want.”

“Maybe it would work for me,” Shannon said. “I have appointments — that’s like a reservation. Let me see.”

Mike pushed his laptop around. “This is a custom dashboard, which means that I told it what KPIs I wanted to watch. That’s a radar chart. It’s good for showing how different kinds of data work together. Like if you plotted no-shows and revenue you might find that there’s a strong inverse relationship between no-shows and revenue.”

“And then if I included whether I might see that there are more no-shows in the winter.”

“Right. And then you might decide to bring in an extra technician just for the warmer months or to require payment in advance during the holidays or something.”

Shannon laughed.

“Okay, maybe not exactly that. I didn’t have time to prepare.” Mike returned to the screen. “This is a trend chart — it shows me that our set-price menu is getting more popular over time. Maybe you have trends you wouldn’t notice without having the data. If things change gradually, it’s easy to miss it.”

“What’s this one?”

“That’s a histogram,” Mike said. “It’s a special kind of bar chart that shows distributions. So I can see the most popular desserts right now, and that helps me make the right number of servings of each.”

“Wow. I had no idea you were this organized.”

“The profit margin for restaurants is not large,” Mike pointed out. “The reason mine is successful is that I really pay attention to these things. Better data means less waste and more profit.”

“I’m sold,” said Shannon, gathering their mugs. “Now I just have to find something that works with a physical therapy practice.”

Can a chart about desserts inspire Shannon to find a solution for her physical therapy practice?

Disclaimer: For HIPAA compliance, all characters appearing in this post are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.