Retail and ecommerce teams use Parabola to access and activate their data and automatically streamline their dynamic workflows.
Parabola allows teams to go beyond the spreadsheet with its drag-and-drop interface. Teams can automate their most time-consuming workflows and create a single source of truth for how a process works, allowing for more efficient and accessible collaboration for the whole team.
Here’s how Juice Press, an organic grab-and-go health food provider, uses Parabola:
The challenge
Before Parabola, Juice Press was manually completing processes across multiple parts of their business, including finance, HR, payroll, and their production team, overall spending hundreds of hours per week on manual, repetitive tasks.
Two processes in particular were eating up most of this time:
- First was their ordering process for each of their 85 store locations. Ariana Korman, Juice Press’s COO, had to manually update inventory and ordering information for each of their 85 store locations.
- Second was their tip allocation process for all in-store employees. Each location was separately managing their own tipping pools in a manual process that required HQ to pull four or five reports into their accounting software.
Even worse than taking up time, these manual tasks widened Juice Press’s margin for error and hurt their operating margins.
Juice Press had a few goals: First, they wanted to get their employees’ time back. They didn’t want to have to continue hiring people to keep up these manual processes. Second, they wanted to improve how these processes were run and get rid of inefficient Excel tasks.
The solution
Juice Press was looking for a solution that was customizable, but also powerful enough to automate all of the tasks they needed to optimize. When they started out with Parabola, they set up a few Flows to address some of their most essential workflow inefficiencies.
The first of their Flows were meant to automate inefficient Excel processes, like tip allocation. They created a 38-step Flow that pulls in tip data for a specific date range from the point of sale from each store location through a direct integration with Square. It pulls data from their payroll system to determine hours worked by each employee within the same date range and generates a report in a format compatible with their payroll system, allowing them to allocate tips accordingly.
They also set up two different Flows to automate ordering inventory for each store location: The first Flow was built to create order templates. It pulls every store’s desired (“par”) and actual inventory levels from MarketMan, their restaurant management system, to automatically calculate order quantities and create order templates for each location. The second Flow ingests the data from each of these order templates into Parabola to create orders through MarketMan's API. These Flows let Juice Press forecast the par level based on sales and compare it with real-time inventory to automatically order the correct amount.
As Juice Press saw the efficiency that Parabola created, they began to view it as an essential workflow optimization tool with tons of opportunity for time and labor cost savings. They took on the position that anything that was time-consuming, manual, and repetitive should be done in Parabola.
“I would be very upset if I could no longer use Parabola,” said Ariana. “I would probably hire another person, because our team just doesn’t have the capacity right now to go back to doing things manually. I would end up having to hire another full-time salaried employee to do what Parabola does.”
Having set up their own Flows initially, Juice Press ultimately opted for a Parabola plan that allowed for more one-on-one support in building out API connections and more complex workflows. This way, Juice Press could be in control and be participants in their own success — and it’s working out well:
“Whenever something comes up, if I email anyone from the Parabola team, they get back to me immediately. The response time is always awesome, and they're always extremely helpful. I don't feel like I'm left to manage a system alone.”
The results
At this point, Parabola is saving Juice Press over 400 hours per week in manual work and over $200,000 a year across the whole company. With the tip allocation Flow, HR and Payroll teams are saving a total of 200+ hours per week in manual work, which translates to over $2,000 per week in labor costs for the company. By automating their ordering workflow for each store location, they’re saving 15 hours per week and eliminating the need to hire full-time help just to keep up their manual workflows.
Juice Press is meeting their goal of empowering each of their employees to play into their own skill sets and do the jobs they were hired to do in the first place. “With Parabola,” Ariana says, “we can focus energy and brainpower on things that require thought, strategy, interpretation, and judgment as opposed to things that are manual — just pressing buttons.”
By implementing Parabola, the Juice Press team has unlocked a ton of possibilities for increasing the efficiency of workflows across their business. They’re actively working with Parabola to identify new Flows to continue to uncover new and creative ways to save time and money.
To see where Parabola can help you save time and resources, set up a demo with our team:
