# What teams build in Prowork for order and shipment tracking > What tracking and exception-alerting flows in Prowork actually do: order status, container ETAs, PO dates, and the alerts that go out when one slips. Source: https://parabola.io/reports/alerts-monitoring --- ## What gets built Tracking and exception alerting turn out to be the same build. A flow that knows where every order, container and purchase order currently stands is also the flow that can say which of them have stopped moving, and most teams arrive at the second by way of the first. Of the 139 companies whose usage went into this study, 108 run some version of this work in Prowork, spread across 2,436 flows that were active in the last 90 days. Grouping those flows by what each one actually does gives the breakdown below. Flows by build patternOrder Management1,019Track & Trace627Inbound Shipment Tracking430Purchase Order Tracking360flows active in the last 90 days Order Management is the largest of those patterns at 1,019 flows across 89 companies, with Track & Trace accounting for another 627 across 53 companies. The grouping follows what a flow does rather than which team happens to own it, which is why one company often turns up in several of these rows at once, and the businesses building the most of them work in apparel, health and beauty, and food and beverage. ## Three of them in detail Three of those flows in more detail, described by what each one does rather than by who built it. Company names are withheld, so each is identified only by the size and category of the business running it. **A $5B+ logistics provider.** Identifies shipment tracking exceptions that require escalation, removes duplicates and suppressed cases, and routes consolidated alerts to the appropriate operations teams. Maintains a sent-escalation log to support follow-up, reporting, and future de-duplication. Built on Google Sheets, API. **A $50M+ logistics provider.** Keeps regional workshop status boards aligned with live fleet activity by adding eligible trucks, updating movement and workshop statuses, and capturing queue dates. Gives maintenance and transport teams an up-to-date view of inbound and in-workshop assets while reducing duplicate records and manual status updates. Built on API, Smartsheet. **A $50M+ apparel brand.** Keeps made-to-order order tracker data centralized and current by capturing vendor-submitted order line updates, standardizing key fields, and preserving history for ship-date comparisons. Built on Redshift, API, email attachments, MySQL. ## What they have in common Read enough of these flows and the same shape keeps appearing. A flow pulls the same records from each system that holds a version of them, standardizes whatever identifiers are needed before those records can be joined at all, applies the comparison or the calculation as explicit logic, and then labels every row with an outcome so that the handful needing attention can be routed to whoever is able to act on them. What differs from one flow to the next is which single step genuinely calls for interpretation. Reading a supplier PDF, resolving a merchant name that never quite matches the ledger, or deciding which category a vague line description belongs in are all handled by AI steps inside the flow, while the matching rules, the tolerances and the thresholds around them stay explicit, since those are the parts a controller or an auditor will eventually want to read for themselves. Most of these run on a schedule or fire from a trigger rather than waiting for someone to remember to open them, and that is largely what separates a report describing what happened last month from a process that surfaces the problem while there is still time to do something about it. The sources they read from are worth noting, because they are rarely the tidy ones. Across the documented flows in this category the most common inputs look like this: Systems these flows read fromEmail attachments182Google Sheets136Direct API72NetSuite56SharePoint30Email26Slack21Shopify12documented flows reading each source Email attachments and spreadsheets sit at the top of that list on most pages, which is a fair description of where operational data actually lives once it leaves a system of record. ## Tracking prompts to start from - [Clear-to-build summaries](https://parabola.io/use-cases/clear-to-build-summary) — A clear-to-build summary answers one question for every finished SKU in every upcoming week: do we have every component the bill of materials calls for, in the quantity it calls… - [Inbound container tracking](https://parabola.io/use-cases/inbound-container-tracking) — Inbound container tracking is a single, current view of every container on its way to you — where each one is, which vessel or truck it is on, and when it is now expected to… - [Overdue invoice escalation](https://parabola.io/use-cases/overdue-invoice-escalation) — Overdue invoice escalation is the routine that finds every invoice past its terms, works out who owns the relationship, and puts that list in front of the people who can do… - [Track production orders against sourcing reality](https://parabola.io/use-cases/production-sourcing-reporting) — Production and sourcing reporting sets the plan against reality: what was ordered from each factory, on what dates, at what cost, compared with what the supplier has actually cut,… - [Auto-answer track-and-trace emails](https://parabola.io/use-cases/track-and-trace-email-automation) — Track and trace is answering the question where is my shipment. - [Inventory replenishment monitoring](https://parabola.io/use-cases/inventory-replenishment-monitoring) — Replenishment monitoring is the standing check that compares current stock for every SKU against the level at which it needs to be reordered, and raises an alert the moment one… - [Marketplace delivery date audit](https://parabola.io/use-cases/marketplace-delivery-date-audit) — A delivery date audit compares the delivery date a marketplace promised the customer against the date the carrier actually delivered, order by order, and counts the misses by… - [Order fulfillment exception alerting](https://parabola.io/use-cases/order-fulfillment-alerting) — A fulfillment exception is an order that has fallen out of the normal path: paid but not picked, picked but not shipped, shipped short, or sitting past the date it should have… - [Order routing](https://parabola.io/use-cases/order-routing) — Order routing decides which fulfillment location ships each order. - [Pull shipment details from notification emails](https://parabola.io/use-cases/extract-shipment-details-email-bodies) — Shipment detail extraction pulls the fields that matter — carrier, tracking number, origin, destination, and ETA — out of the notification emails that carriers, forwarders, and… - [Purchase order tracking](https://parabola.io/use-cases/purchase-order-tracking) — Purchase order tracking keeps the status of every open PO current: what was ordered, what the supplier has confirmed, what has shipped, and whether the expected delivery date… - [Text drivers as soon as the milestone fires](https://parabola.io/use-cases/text-drivers-track-trace) — Milestone-triggered messaging watches shipment status for the events that matter — dispatched, arrived, loaded, delivered, delayed — and sends the right person the right text the…