Freeing people from the tasks they hate is one of the best morale boosters you can offer.
The problem
Use case 1
A high-growth business weighed down by manual work
Passport helps e-commerce brands go global—from checkout to customs. But behind the scenes, a lot of their success depended on people doing tedious, manual work. As the company scaled and acquired a new business, the operations team faced a growing challenge: how to continue supporting more customers without increasing headcount or slowing down the team.
“We’re a very operationally heavy company,” said Ashlea Holt, Biz Ops Manager at Passport. “We had amazing internal tech, but we were still relying on people to solve problems that tools could solve. It wasn’t sustainable.”
The solution
Use case 2
A faster, easier way to automate processes without engineering
Ashlea’s team started experimenting with Parabola to tackle some of their most time-consuming workflows. Early on, they automated their internal and customer-facing freight tracker, which had been taking 30 to 45 minutes a day to update by hand.
“Now it’s ready every morning at 8am. No one has to touch it.”
They went on to automate one of their most painful processes: monthly 3PL invoice auditing. The work included aggregating charges, auditing line items against rate cards, and flagging discrepancies for follow-up. It used to take the team 3 to 5 full business days each month. Now the same process takes just one business day, and they’re on track to reduce that even further in the coming weeks.
It used to be a huge lift every month. Now it’s down to a single day, and we’re expecting to cut that to just a few hours. No one misses doing it the old way. Freeing people from the tasks they hate is one of the best morale boosters you can offer.”
Parabola also became the go-to solution for high-priority operational issues that popped up unexpectedly. One team had been spending two hours a day manually auditing manifests for a complex, bundled product. The process involved cross-referencing data across days’ worth of shipment trackers and manifests, often spanning more than 1,000 shipments per day.
Within days, they built a Parabola flow that flagged only the shipments needing attention—transforming a tedious, error-prone task into one that’s clean, intuitive, and easy to review.
That kind of agility has shifted how Passport’s operations team approaches problem-solving.
“Every quarter I ask the front line operations team to identify their biggest time-suck, like those hours manually spent digging for exceptions,” said Kat Sun, VP of Operations at Passport.
“Instead of queuing up an engineering ticket, our first move now is, ‘Can Parabola fix this?’ More than half the time, it can.”
The results
Use case 3
Time saved, headcount preserved, and a smarter way to scale
With Parabola in place, the Biz Ops team has not only saved time—they’ve helped shift the entire company’s mindset. Instead of defaulting to hiring or requesting engineering help, teams now ask if Parabola can solve it first.
- 3PL invoice auditing reduced from 3–5 days to 1 business day: Full charge aggregation and review now happens faster, with more time savings expected soon
- Freight tracking process fully automated: Daily updates that once took up to 45 minutes now happen automatically with no manual work
- Faster response to high-priority issues: Built new data workflows in days, avoiding weeks of engineering backlog
- On track to 2x customer base within 12 months: Helped scale an acquired business with only two new hires
- Sharper resourcing decisions: Teams now think more critically about whether tasks need to be owned by a person or automated with Parabola
- Boosted morale: Replaced frustrating tasks with automation, freeing people up to focus on higher-impact work
“With peak season ahead, we’re building out more use cases to help us scale without drowning in manual work,” Ashlea said.
“It’s not just about saving time. It’s about staying focused on real customer problems instead of constantly playing catch-up.”
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This customer story is for informational purposes only. Parabola makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.
