Parabola's Blog

Flexport uses Parabola to save millions of dollars per year by transforming their Operations Team into high-velocity data engineers. Here’s how they did it, and how your business can do it too.

This post is for sales and rev ops leaders who are being asked to hit a crazy revenue target (shoutout to all the VCs out there) but do so with fewer resources during a recession. I can’t imagine my job without the tools we’ve developed over the last few months so I wanted to share in the hope of adding value (and perhaps even building some pipeline).

The average ERP takes 12 months to set up. Using Parabola, Fulcrum’s Launch team can implement theirs in 12 weeks. Here’s how Parabola enabled Fulcrum to onboard 3x more new customers in a year - without adding any headcount - and how your SaaS company can do it too.

Every business solves certain problems by throwing people at them. Those people are Operators.

Having a strong understanding of your inventory at all times is a must. One of the more crucial times to track this is when your inventory first arrives at your warehouse. Auditing your newly arrived inventory ensures that you are receiving the quantity you’ve ordered and are able to fulfill your customers’ orders.

The Parabola team has been working hard in 2022! So hard that we might have skipped writing a Spring update 😅. But it’s summer now, and we’re looking back at all the things we’ve been building so far this year.

Traditionally, workflows tend to live in a few “analog” locations: spreadsheets, co-workers’ brains, and sometimes literal paper and sticky notes. Let’s talk about why moving workflows into the Browser, instead, is a huge deal!

Even if your organization has a really excellent data science and engineering team we think you should still be excited about Parabola. It gives everyone the ability to customize data workflows in a way that's safe. When the workflows are legible between the team everyone starts to get better ideas. And finally, you will save lots of valuable data- and engineering-team time. To illustrate why, let’s look at a simple use case involving inventory.

Excel and Google Sheets are basically payday lenders for operational debt. They offer a quick and dirty solution for basically any operational problem with near-zero repeatability. But they’re taking on debt that will quickly manifest in a handful of forms.

Even the best plans regarding freight tend to change when the boats hit the water. But that’s no reason you can’t have a complete, real-time view into your in-transit freight — by SKU and by destination, no less. Watch this 5-minute walkthrough to find out how.

In-transit inventory, also known as pipeline inventory, refers to inventory that has been purchased and is en route to a physical store, warehouse, or distribution center. Though this inventory hasn’t been received at a physical location, it is still included as part of a brand’s overall inventory levels.

By building a Parabola Flow, I’m able to keep my Design team’s browser width breakpoints up-to-date and accurate, giving us consistent confidence that we’re designing for the right screen sizes. This simple automation saves me hours and gives me access to fresh data I otherwise wouldn’t have.

As we look ahead to 2022, we look back on our major investments of 2021: bolstering team collaboration, making Flow building more delightful and powerful, and launching new integrations.

Our CEO, Alex Yaseen, joined Shopify Expert Steve Hutt's eCommerce Fastlane podcast to talk about how Shopify stores such as Volcom, Great Jones, and UMZU are unlocking new levels of productivity through data automation. 

Robert Walker, Vice President of Growth at UMZU, uses Parabola to access the data across all of the different platforms they use, like Shopify, SkuVault, Google Analytics, and bring that data together to make important business decisions.