Any little sliver of promise that we can get from Parabola is a godsend.
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What do you do when your business complexity doubles but you can’t add headcount?
For Rhone, a high-performance apparel brand, this wasn’t a hypothetical question: With imported shipment volume doubling annually, SKU counts nearly tripling, and no ability to expand their team, they needed to find a way to scale their operations without scaling their workforce.
The answer came in the form of automation—but not the kind that replaces human workers.
Instead, Rhone found a way to amplify their existing team’s capabilities through strategic process automation, turning what was once a constant struggle to keep up into a streamlined operation that could handle increasing complexity with grace.
This is the story of how one team transformed their operations and preserved their sanity in the process.
The challenge
Use case 1
In late 2023, Rhone’s operations team faced a perfect storm: With no ability to add headcount and rapidly increasing complexity across their business, the team was struggling to keep up with growing demand. Their VP of Operations Nancy Yellen was watching her team burn out from manual processes that required constant attention, particularly during peak seasons.
“We don’t have the leisure of a next man up on this team,” Yellen explained. "We’re not the revenue generators, we’re the back office. So unless we’re coming up with huge saving strategies, we’re not adding bodies.”
For Chris Garbutt, Rhone’s Operational Business Analyst, the daily reality of these constraints meant constantly juggling urgent requests while trying to maintain critical business processes. “I act as a liaison to all of the business, so anyone can come to me with a question, and I’ll go find an answer,” he told Parabola. This meant spending hours diving into Excel sheets, reading formulas, and trying to piece together how different departments were getting to their numbers.
But the challenge wasn’t just about time—it was also about knowledge transfer. Many critical processes existed only in the heads of one or two people, creating significant business risk.
This all came to a head during the 2023 peak season, when the team faced its toughest challenge yet.
Orders weren’t flowing properly, integrations were failing, and the process of identifying missing orders required 45 minutes of manual report pulling and reconciliation. The emotional toll on the team was significant, creating friction between operations and enterprise systems teams.
The situation was particularly challenging during peak season, when the team needed to perform order tie-outs three times per day.
“We were spending hours and hours doing these tie-outs,” Garbutt recalled. “And you were doing that for orders and for fulfillment.” The pressure was immense, as failing to catch issues could result in customer backorders and shipping delays.
The solution
Use case 2
A well-timed email introduced Rhone to Parabola, and Garbutt began building automated workflows to address their most pressing challenges immediately.
Automated tie-out processes
The first priority was creating automated “tie-out” processes for orders and fulfillment. They needed to ensure that orders properly flowed between systems and that shipments were properly tracked.
How to reconcile inventory across systems with Parabola
Before Parabola, these tie-outs required pulling multiple reports from different systems (Shopify, NetSuite, their 3PL), saving them in folders, and performing complex Excel lookups and matches. “Each run would take 35 to 40 minutes,” Garbutt noted. “Mainly because you’ve also got to wait for these reports to fall, they’re not quick.”
Inventory tracking during 3PL changes
Another critical automation came during a major warehouse move, where the team needed to track millions of dollars worth of inventory moving between facilities.
“I wanted to know where every single SKU and every single box was,” Garbutt explained, “whether that was on a truck in transit, whether it was sitting on a staging pallet at the front of the building, or whether it was in the other building on a pallet or already been put to a shelf.” This visibility proved crucial when some shipments warranted splitting due to exceeding standard insurance coverage.
Shipment visibility tracker
The team’s automation journey expanded rapidly as they discovered new opportunities: One particularly impactful Flow was built for their inbound logistics specialist, who manages hundreds of shipments from factories into their US distribution center.
Example of an automated inbound freight tracking Flow in Parabola
“He was an email machine,” Yellen said. “He was rebuilding his workload every day, compiling in-transit updates coming in through email in another email to the team for visibility.” The team created a Flow that automatically updates their database with shipment dates, countries of origin, and HTS codes, saving 5-6 hours of manual updates per week.
Plus Flows to support EDI compliance and finance reconciliation for month-end closing
And for their finance team, the automation of reconciliation processes has been transformative. “Finance’s Flows are related to credit memo and refund records out of Shopify compared to NetSuite,” Garbutt told Parabola. These automated reconciliations have helped the finance team significantly reduce their month-end close time, saving approximately 20 hours per month.
The team’s latest project focuses on streamlining their planning department’s allocation process. “It’s something that they spend up to 7 hours a week on,” Garbutt notes. “And there’s human error that comes with this kind of work...a comma in the wrong spot can throw off your entire math.”
The new Flow will not only save time but also reduce the risk of costly mistakes.
The results
Use case 3
The implementation of Parabola has transformed how Rhone’s operations team functions.
What was once a process requiring team members to be on-call nights and weekends during peak season has been reduced to simply monitoring Slack notifications: “Now when someone’s on call, all they have to do is just look at Slack every hour and make sure there aren’t excessive alerts,” Yellen explains.
The impact has been particularly dramatic in their logistics operations. The team handled a doubling of shipments and a tripling of active SKUs without adding headcount. Their finance team has found substantial efficiencies within the month-end process, allowing the team to reclaim upwards of 7 hours per week. Time that was previously spent on manual data entry and reconciliation is now being redeployed in more value-adding areas and analysis.
Perhaps most importantly, the automation has de-personalized system issues and improved cross-team collaboration. “It changed the whole paradigm of our ability to be insightful and transparent without emotion,” Yellen notes. “Now there’s just a report, and it says what it says.”
Looking ahead, Rhone continues to expand their use of Parabola, with Garbutt building new Flows to support their growing complexity. Parabola has become their solution for scaling operations without adding headcount, providing what Yellen calls their “saving grace” in an environment of increasing business complexity and constrained resources.
“Any little sliver of promise that we can get from Parabola is a godsend,” Yellen concludes. “And that’s how we were sold on the cost for this year.”
