Flexport drives over $8M a year in ROI by automating their essential workflows in Parabola

Flexport is on a mission to make global trade easy for everyone. With over 10,000 brands that rely on their end-to-end supply chain services, Flexport moves tens of billions of dollars worth of inventory across the globe each year.

Like many supply chain businesses, Flexport was fueling much of its day-to-day operations with manual workflows centered around spreadsheets and email. Not only is this inefficient and costly, but it's hard to fully trust your data when so much of it is managed manually by different people. Flexport came to Parabola in search of a solution, and they identified and realized significant savings in multiple areas of their business.

The challenge: Achieving a scalable cost to serve while streamlining error-prone manual workflows

A number of teams at Flexport were stuck using manual and labor-intensive processes. To streamline their supply chain process in an industry that hasn’t changed in decades, the Flexport team needed support in three critical areas: 

• Data reconciliation to standardize and build trust in carrier and vendor data
• Document digitization to streamline complex Customs filing processes
• Operational visibility to better understand the status of any given shipment

Flexport’s Customs operations and bill processing teams use Parabola to streamline their supply chain operations in each of these three areas.

The solution: Reconciling data, streamlining document ingestion, and implementing more granular operational visibility

Flexport deals with massive amounts of carrier data on a daily basis that comes in different formats, from different sources, and with different endpoints. They needed a quicker, more accurate way to reconcile their data from sources like Customs filings and internal reports to automatically feed it to the right places.

So, what does this look like?

Automatically recouping fees for customers via duty drawback

Flexport has dedicated staff that manages duty drawback for their clients: When they can connect the importation of goods to exports or destructions, they are able to help their customers recoup 99% of their import duties, taxes, and fees. This is a main revenue driver for Flexport.

In order to file drawback claims, Flexport uses Parabola to reconcile data from various sources such as:

• Internal databases
• Shipping data from suppliers
• Government portals like NetCHB and ACE

By automating drawback filing in Parabola, Flexport delayed hiring additional headcount by four to six months, resulting in $50k in labor cost savings. They also increased drawback filing throughput by 50%, resulting in an additional $1.6M in savings per associate — 10% of which is captured as revenue.

Over the last year, Flexport has helped their customers recoup millions of dollars through drawback as a result of automating their drawback preparation process.

“Drawback is extremely complex, but it's an essential part of our business. Parabola has allowed us to seamlessly pull in complex shipment data from multiple sources to consistently deliver on our promise of recouping the majority of applicable Customs fees,” said Tim Vorderstrasse, Director of Drawback at Flexport and President of the Atlanta International Forwarders and Brokers Association.

Streamlining freight audit and invoice validation while maintaining visibility

The freight audit team at Flexport lived in Google Sheets and Excel. They were downloading hundreds of spreadsheets each day with invoice data to validate shipments and charges. To further complicate matters, many of their customers had unique shipping rates and rate calculations. This meant Flexport had to manually create unique spreadsheets for each client with individualized calculation requirements to account for these differences.

"Before Parabola, we were spending countless hours in spreadsheets every day for our freight audit process, and with all the manual work, we still couldn't fully trust our outputs. Since automating the process, we’ve been able to recoup significant duties, taxes, and fees. We've also seen huge labor savings and we know our audits are accurate," said TJ Mitchell, Freight Audit Manager at Flexport.

Flexport uses Parabola to automate the bill auditing process that pulls in data from various sources such as Looker and Google Sheets. The final output is an Expected Cost (EPC) report, which helps them categorize vendor bills by low, medium, and high-risk for defects.

Automating the bill auditing process has enabled the team to focus more of their energy on medium to high-risk vendor bills. This means they can scale across new regions internationally and new modes like trucking and air — and do so without hiring additional headcount.

The Parabola Flows they’re using have saved hours per week for the team, amounting to savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor each year — not to mention the peace of mind Flexport has knowing that the amounts they’re paying to their vendors are accurate.

Digitizing essential documents, seamlessly

Flexport files and processes thousands of critical documents for their customers on a daily basis. All of this information is sent via email as a PDF or Excel file, which meant Flexport was stuck manually ingesting and filing thousands of forms daily.

Flexport now uses Parabola to ingest, clean, and format documents for seamless filing. Now, they are anticipating thousands of dollars per year in cost savings after implementing their document digitization Flows in Parabola.

Gilles Lagast, Global Director of Business Operations, Customs at Flexport, said “The value Parabola has added to internal reporting and preparing workflows at Flexport is huge. We've seen such a dramatic reduction in our cost to serve since implementing, and Parabola has been a key partner in our quest to reduce cost to serve and performance transparency.”

Always knowing shipment status to avoid demurrage

To avoid accessorial fees, Flexport must move thousands of containers within the time allowed before their last free day (LFD). There is a lot of data from carriers that is automated and also presented in the form of flat data files to parse through. 

“We've got thousands of containers at any given point that we have to keep track of, and we have to know when each of them is going to start incurring fees. This was a substantial challenge before but Parabola has made it a reality,” said Mark Cummings, Director of Supply Chain Operations at Flexport.

Flexport now uses Parabola to standardize and consolidate shipment data and validate key milestone details. They built a Parabola Flow that generates a real-time report of select data points for open shipments and even sends automatic alerts to the appropriate carriers when there are data discrepancies.

By automating the process of the data validation reporting, Flexport has the opportunity to substantially reduce their time to serve, with potentially tens of thousands of dollars of time savings annually. And by consistently alerting carriers and internal teams on data flags, they stand to protect themselves and their customers from hundreds of thousands in demurrage fees over the coming months.

The results

For Flexport, Parabola is a tool to create smarter workflow processes, resulting in a considerable reduction in fees, time, and overall cost to serve. Since they have removed so much of their manual, error-prone work with Parabola, the team at Flexport can now trust the outputs they’re generating and spend more time on strategic work.

“Parabola is a game-changer delivering tangible results and revolutionizing our data operations. By harnessing its solutions, we have automated a broad range of complex data tasks, leading to cost savings and expedited revenues that now amount to millions of dollars each year. The seamless automation has not only freed up invaluable time and resources, but it has also unlocked previously untapped revenue channels, further fueling our growth," said Lagast.

Most importantly, Flexport has leveled up their workforce. Before, they were completing data-intensive and mission-critical workflows manually in spreadsheets and email. The processes were not only error-prone due to being completed by hand, but they took hours per week to complete.

Now, Flexport has empowered employees of all backgrounds — technical and non-technical operators alike — to create their own solutions for the problems they know best. They now have the ability to build whatever Flow they need to make their work more accurate and efficient, without the use of any software engineering resources whatsoever.

By diligently reconciling data, streamlining the digitization of essential documents, and optimizing their alerting and reporting processes, Flexport is seeing an ROI of more than $8.27M per year across cost savings and revenue acceleration as a result of using Parabola for their essential workflows.

To learn how to automate your team's mission-critical workflows, set up a time to chat with our team.