Hours have turned into minutes.
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Fever, chills, headache, body aches, fatigue, cough, chest tightness, difficulty breathing, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting.
The fact is: If you cook with some conventional nonstick pans, you’re at risk of contracting Teflon flu — and its laundry list of unsavory symptoms.
Which is why Jordan Nathan, the founder of Caraway Home, wanted to create a better solution for home cooks. “A few years back, I accidentally heated a non-stick Teflon-coated pan and got sick with the Teflon flu,” Nathan says when recounting the brand’s origin story. “I found that it only took 2.5 minutes for Teflon-coated pans to heat to 500ºF and begin releasing toxic chemicals into the air.
And Nathan definitely isn’t the only consumer concerned about the chemicals that can be released into cooking and food storage products. Caraway’s rapid growth is evidence of that.
The Parabola team sat down with Katya Lotzof, the brand’s Associate Director of Logistics and Fulfillment Operations, to learn more about how they’re automating as much as they can to prepare for continued growth and expansion into new channels.
The Caraway team has been using Parabola for eight months — and in that time, they’ve managed to implement: landed cost automation, automated end-of-month reporting, pre-transit monitoring, and an inventory position dashboard.
Here’s their story.
The challenge
Use case 1
Tons of manual processes limiting growth
As the Associate Director of Logistics and Fulfillment Operations at Caraway, Lotzof has a huge scope. Her purview includes managing inbound and outbound logistics, 3PL relationships, dropship wholesale orders, Amazon business operations, cross-functional forecasting, and freight forwarding.
Across all of those areas of responsibility, Lotzof reported inefficiencies that were creating bottlenecks. Her team was performing manual landed cost calculations, didn’t have real-time visibility into inventory across sales channels, struggled to be proactive when it came to shipping issues — and Lotzof was worried about the inevitable human errors that arise when dealing with huge sums of data manually.
Automation is one of the key things I have been focusing on since I started working at Caraway, so I knew this was a good time to capitalize on some automation opportunities.”
Katya Lotzof, Associate Director of Logistics and Fulfillment Operations
She knew they needed to find a solution.
“When you grow, tiny issues become big issues,” Lotzof told Parabola. “And you can’t just keep adding manual work. Automation is one of the key things I have been focusing on since I started working at Caraway, so I knew this was a good time to capitalize on some automation opportunities.”
The solution
Use case 2
End-to-end automated operations
If there’s one thing to know about Lotzof, it’s that if there’s something to automate, she will automate it. She has an amazing capacity to identify areas where automation will make the biggest impact, and Parabola has given her the tools necessary to actually realize her vision…and her vision was clear from the start.
Before we had a call, the team sent me demo videos and training documentation. When we started our conversation, I already knew the terminology — I knew what the Canvas was and generally how building worked,” says Lotzof. “It made it easier for me to understand what’s happening in Parabola.”
And it also made it easier for her to immediately solve one of their most frustrating problems: Processing landed cost.
Landed cost automation
Processing landed cost is notoriously difficult and time consuming.
For brands to fully understand the total cost of a product once it reaches its final destination requires incorporating data from multiple sources — and it isn’t uncommon for this data to come in unstructured, difficult-to-work with formats like PDFs.
For Lotzof, this process required getting invoice data out of PDFs that were emailed to her and copy-pasting them into a template that would flow into Fulfil (their ERP) where landed cost was calculated.
“It was very time consuming,” she told me.
Here’s how Parabola completely eliminates that work:
- The Flow automatically processes invoice PDFs that come in through email
- The Extract with AI step identifies the invoice type (whether it’s core, accessorial, credit memo, etc.)
- It then reformats the data to match the ERP requirements
- And populates a standardized template, ready to import
Once Lotzof got this Flow up and running, she was hooked. Here’s what else the team built:
Pre-transit monitoring
Next, the team tackled automated pre-transit monitoring, which is the process of identifying shipments that haven’t shown tracking activity for a certain amount of time.
Having visibility into this allows Caraway to get proactive with customer service if a shipment is held up — and it improves customer experience through faster issue resolution.
Before building this Flow, the Caraway team would pull manual reports from EasyPost Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with each report taking about one hour to pull and format.
With Parabola, the Flow monitors tracking data from EasyPost, automatically identifies shipments without movement, generates reports on that data, and surfaces it to the right people so they can determine next steps. Collecting this information used to take three hours a week — now it happens all of the time and is completely automated.
Inventory position dashboard
“Another amazing Flow that is loved by many teams is our inventory position dashboard,” says Lotzof.
The team at Caraway created a Google Sheet that’s updated using Parabola that includes: Inventory positions for all SKUs per location, dedicated tabs for bundles and BOMs, and upcoming inventory arrivals with units.
Pre-Parabola, they ran into issues with a similar sheet that was manually updated by humans. Lotzof explained the pain: “You know if there is a Google Sheet there are multiple owners, and there might be human errors that affect the data. Sometimes the formula is overwritten or things get inputted incorrectly. Parabola helps to resolve this issue because the data is updated through the platform.”
This has been a huge value add for Caraway and for the ops team’s cross-functional relationships. Teams can self-serve inventory information, there’s increased visibility into overstocked and out-of-stock positions, and future inventory plans are more clear.
End-of-month reporting
Before Parabola, end-of-month reporting was a huge hassle. The Caraway team had to pull multiple reports from their ERP system, and were always up against a limitation of 20,000 entries per export. The process could take up to 12 hours over a few days during peak season, and they often had to pull up several reports.
When the team felt particularly under water, they’d rely on their ERP partner to pull reports for them due to how manual and time-consuming the process was.
With Parabola, the process now takes about 30 minutes. In Parabola:
- Reports are automatically ingested into Parabola, eliminating the need for manual data pulls
- Parabola performs all of the data consolidation and lookups the team was performing by hand before
- They have constant insight into their data instead of relying on a once-monthly pull from the ops team
The results
Use case 3
“Hours have turned into minutes.”
Across the Flows that Caraway has built, they’ve realized immense value.
To name a few highlights, Caraway has:
- Decreased peak season end-of-month reporting from 12 hours to 30 minutes
- Eliminated the need to spend an hour on pre-transit reports — these reports now happen automatically, in real time
- Cut landed cost processing time from 1.5 hours to 10 minutes
- Improved data accuracy across the board
To put it in Lotzof’s words: “Hours have turned into minutes.”
Outside of the very clear quantitative impact Parabola has had for the Caraway team, Lotzof also mentioned something that could arguably be even more impactful: Team morale is up and to the right.
Parabola has eliminated tons and tons of manual steps, it saves hours of work on a weekly basis, and it also helps eliminate human errors. And because my team is not working on these manual, repetitive steps, they can focus on something else. Their morale is actually improving because they can work on something interesting and exciting rather than boring and repetitive.”
Katya Lotzof, Associate Director of Logistics and Fulfillment Operations
Lotzof’s laser focus on automation has definitely paid off for Caraway and her team — and it’s created an absolute Parabola power user who is always looking for what’s next in the process.
When I asked Lotzof how she thinks her team would do if their Flows got ripped up tomorrow, she said “When you’re spoiled with something amazing and it’s taken away from you, you’d treasure it a lot more. We would be able to manage, but it would definitely add back many hours of work — and some things would have to fall through the cracks.”
