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To be able to recreate what we’re doing in Parabola on a day-to-day basis without the tool would require human capital.
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For Austin-based boot and apparel company Tecovas, the whole team is committed to embodying “radical hospitality” in all of the work that they do.
For the operations team, this means keeping beloved SKUs in stock, nailing labor management with their 3PL, and providing their collaborators with access to data that powers strategic decision making—plus industry-best customer service reflective of the brand’s Texas roots.
Tecovas has grown rapidly since its founding in 2015. With 12 new retail stores opened in 2024 and more planned for 2025—plus an expanding wholesale business—the company faces increasingly complex data challenges across its operations.
“It’s easy on paper to talk about how you open a store and how you bring to life these wholesale relationships,“ says VP of Supply Chain Nate Peterson, “but the amount of work, the volume of transactions, and the volume of data that it presents to the team to manage…it’s not easy.”
In the midst of all of all this exciting growth, they came across a number of data challenges that were a perfect match for Parabola. Here’s how they went from disconnected data and limited visibility to an organization with data as their cornerstone.
The challenge
Use case 1
Before Parabola, Tecovas’s teams were drowning in manual data work.
The ops team’s critical daily snapshot of supply chain and distribution metrics was housed in what their VP of Supply Chain called “an Excel/Google Sheets/Dropbox/.csv patched-together mixture of documents.”
Referred to as their “heartbeat report,” it required ops team members to constantly manually compile data from multiple sources.
The data was only as current as the previous day’s 4 AM update, meaning teams were constantly working with stale information. “The team would pull that data, they would merge it against NetSuite data, and then they would merge it against what was stored in Dropbox, which housed our forecasting data,“ explains Peterson. This manual process made it nearly impossible to make timely decisions about inventory and warehouse staffing.
Meanwhile, the planning and sourcing teams were facing their own challenges.
For Apparel and Accessories Planner Chelsey Parker, there is a huge focus on what they are internally calling their “never-out-of-stock” initiative.
“We have core SKUs, but we haven’t really ever done an analysis on the missed opportunity that we’ve had by not having those SKUs in stock at all times,” explains Parker. Their Excel-based system was so cumbersome that “it was virtually impossible to work in it, especially for footwear, where there’s like 40 sizes per SKU.“
Her team was on the line though to keep the most popular styles in stock at all times—but they also want to be cautious about overstocking. With rows and rows of difficult to understand data, this was a huge challenge.
And for the sourcing team and Senior Category Manager Mallory Smith, there were endless data messes to clean up.
Smith describes how vendors would send weekly shipping reports with inconsistent formatting—some using incorrect vendor codes, others adding random spaces in PO numbers. With 40,000 units on a single PO and month-long shipping windows, tracking actual deliveries was a nightmare. “None of that is tracked systematically,” Smith explains. “So a lot of the data that my team is parsing through on a weekly basis, we’re pushing through Parabola to help us analyze it instead of spending most of our time building it.”
The solution
Use case 2
Automated heartbeat reporting
This report has led to a six-figure reduction in labor costs, lowering Tecovas’s CPU and contributing to more efficient 3PL operations, especially during their peak season.
Tecovas built an automated flow in Parabola that pulls data hourly from multiple sources to give teams real-time visibility into supply chain performance. The flow combines historical data with current sales, orders, and shipping information from their 3PL provider Geodis.
“The goal of the team is to not attempt to wake up each day and try to find the problems. The goal is to wake up and be alerted to the problems and go in attack mode,” explains Peterson. This real-time visibility is especially crucial during their Black Friday/Cyber Monday period, which drives a significant portion of annual sales.
One thing this automated reporting enables is quick decisions about labor planning: “If we saw a variation to planned sales or we saw us missing forecasts through about the 12 o’clock hour, we could then say, hey guys, lets reallocate resources accordingly, come back tomorrow and save four or five hours of overhead,“ Peterson explains. This flexibility with their 3PL partner helps optimize labor costs while maintaining service levels.
There has also been a tangible impact on both Tecovas’ CPU (cost-per-unit) and UPH (units-per-hour) metrics: “We measure what we’re doing on a weekly basis from a CPU and a UPH perspective. We’re always looking for a decreased CPU or an increased UPH—and that’s 100% where we’re driving the business.”
And overall, this “heartbeat reporting” gives the ops team major leverage throughout the business: “If I’m on our leadership team and I get a question at two in the morning and I want to know how we’re doing from a distribution and supply chain perspective, I should be able to get that data in real time and be able to self-serve and answer that question,” Peterson says.
That’s Tecovas’s reality—and this self-serve, data-enabled company culture is the outcome of getting full-team buy-in on a tool like Parabola.
Never-out-of-stock management
By keeping their most popular SKUs always in stock, the Tecovas team identified hundreds of thousands in revenue opportunity—just in jeans.
The planning team created a streamlined system that transformed their inventory management capabilities.
“Reducing those data dumps into one really simple paste, and then enabling us to simplify the formulas into quicker moving formulas, means that all our planners can actually work in these sheets efficiently,” says Parker.
Explore consolidated inventory reporting in Parabola
This new visibility revealed significant opportunities. In apparel alone, Parker identified “hundreds of thousands in opportunity just in jeans, because we weren't looking at them month over month.”
The Annie boot, their number one women’s SKU, was frequently out of stock in at least one color. The team now uses average per store per day (APS) calculations to quantify missed sales opportunities and better predict inventory needs.
The impact has been so dramatic that core SKUs are now “probably 80% of the focus of the planning team,” according to Parker. “Those new SKUs are a much smaller percentage of our time.”
Vendor data automation
Access to clean, current vendor data gives the Tecovas team more bargaining power when it comes to negotiating with vendors.
For the sourcing team, Parabola automatically cleans and standardizes vendor data, maintaining a historical record while providing clean, current information. “It basically keeps a history of everything that they’ve ever sent us, and then adds the latest file that they sent us. So I have a clean upload,” explains Smith.
This automation has improved vendor relationships and accountability. “We’re having a conversation with one of our biggest footwear factories this week around their data,” Smith shares. “Being able to look at that data side by side and be like, ‘Hey, this is how inaccurate you are on a weekly basis,’ has allowed us to go to them and say, ‘These are the improvements that we need.’”
The automated system also feeds multiple downstream reports, including a CX Incoming Inventory Report that helps customer service representatives answer product availability questions and enables the wholesale team to better manage client expectations.
The results
Use case 3
If it hasn’t already been abundantly clear the ways that Tecovas has benefited from their work in Parabola, they report:
- Six-figure savings in relation to labor management
- Hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue from ensuring popular SKU availability
- Decreased CPU and increased UPH
- 20 hours a month freed up for the team’s data analyst to actually analyze data — not just corral and clean it
- Self-serve data access for CX, marketing, and the C-Suite
- Real-time data visibility that leads to better decision making across the board
And those are just the more tangible benefits.
The impact has been so significant that when asked what would happen if Parabola disappeared tomorrow, Parker responds: “I would have to completely redo all of our flow sheets…I just don't think it would be manageable.” The sourcing team “would be drowning in fixing data,” according to Smith, with impacts rippling across the organization.
As for Peterson: “To be able to recreate what we’re doing in Parabola on a day-to-day basis, without the tool, to be quite frank, it would require human capital. We would have to add resources to achieve the same results. We would have to bring people in to run these reports, to crunch the data, to aggregate it and provide it in maybe a close-to-the-same (but probably not even the same) format.
As Tecovas continues its rapid expansion, Parabola has become essential infrastructure for managing their growing complexity. “Parabola has been the tool that has been able to get data out of our systems and support that initiative,” concludes Peterson.
