Parabola blog

From bonded warehouses to pursuing a more global diversification strategy, here are five supply chain experts on the path forward for brands.

Learn about the most impactful AI use cases being deployed by operators across brands like Brooklinen, On Running, and Flexport.

Freight and parcel audits are crucial for businesses for whom shipping merchandise is a core business function. Learn how to conduct them and save money, improve efficiency, and more.

From shipping zone & weight analysis Flows to Flows that perform SLA evaluations, here are the most creative submissions to the Custom Transform Contest.

Excess inventory is produced in essentially every commercial sector. Explore different ways to sell, recycle, and donate extra inventory you may have on hand—and see what technology is helping brands do this thoughtfully.

Use a landed cost calculator to better understand the actual cost of securing and moving inventory for your business—and to avoid making common mistakes and manual errors.

Avoid these three common pitfalls, and elevate your landed cost analysis from a back-of-the-napkin exercise to a strategic, data-driven process.

Delivering products on-time and in-full is one of the foundational steps to providing a positive customer experience. Here’s why measuring OTIF is important — and how to automate it.

Automated 3PL scorecarding improves visibility into vendor performance and gives brands the chance to truly understand which packages are arriving to customers and partners on-time and in-full.

CSVs are a common way to store and share data, but sometimes you need to get that information into a more robust spreadsheet format like Excel. Here’s how.

Choosing the right warehouse management software (WMS) can get small businesses ready for the big leagues — and the right tech can also transform your supply chain, boost efficiency, and improve your bottom line.

Freight audits are critical for any business that wants to optimize its supply chain and become more data-driven. If you’re not conducting them, you’re likely leaving money on the table.

Explore the top warehouse management systems (WMS) for automation, efficiency, and scalability. Compare solutions from Manhattan, ShipHero, Extensiv, and more for your business.

Landed cost analysis is the antidote to “vibes-based budgeting” and provides data-driven clarity around your true costs and profitability. Here’s how.

Advice from four ecommerce leaders on tactical ways to protect your brand from order and returns fraud.

For Parabola’s CEO Alex Yaseen, the future of data automation will be collaborative, approachable, and AI-powered — and it will also get operators out of spreadsheets.

From supply chain automation to master COGS files, today’s ops leaders are speaking finance fluently and building bridges between execution and economics.

It’s not hard to find people talking about how to build data-driven teams, but it is hard to find people who are actually doing it.

The modern warehouse holds tons of data that often goes untapped — here’s how to use your warehouse inventory management system to gather (and action on) it.

As Pair Eyewear expanded their wholesale business, an influx of POs were flooding the team’s inbox. Here’s how they tackled purchase order management with Parabola.

Implementing AI in your supply chain processes doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are 3 things you’re probably already doing that could level up with AI.

Matt Hertz likens finding the right 3PL to finding a romantic match. Here’s the advice he has for building a relationship with your 3PL that really sticks — and making 3PL management a breeze.

With hard-to-predict macro conditions making predictability an impossibility, here’s how the folks leading ops teams prepped for this peak season.

Get exclusive access to an ops sandbox where you can see how companies like Brooklinen and Caraway run parcel invoice audits, inventory reconciliation, and order consolidation.

We’re excited to share three related updates that will enhance the way Parabola users build and interact with Flows: visualizations on the Canvas, dynamic dashboarding capabilities, and live editing with more powerful drafts.

Between managing Seed Health’s expansion into Amazon and Target and building a world-class team along the way, Keith Frymark knows a thing or two about how to launch (and scale) omnichannel fulfillment.

Parabola’s latest release leverages AI to automatically document every step of your Parabola Flows in real time as you build.

During a particularly busy holiday season, Great Jones experienced stockouts and interrupted engraving service — here’s how they’ve since deployed Parabola to make sure they stay resilient when business is booming.

As seen on Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged, learn about Parabola's experience building an account-based marketing motion.

Despite unpredictable shipping blockages, pressure from execs to cut costs, and planning for holiday in full swing, operations leaders are finding ways to stay afloat.

Take two minutes to see how you could be extracting data hidden difficult-to-access formats and weaving it into your workflows.

Between our customers and engineering team, there were a lot of building wins last month. From a new Pull from file queue step to an impressive inbound PO management Flow, let’s get into it.

From whether to outsource automation or do it internally to how to charge your “AI trust battery,” here’s how to incorporate automation and AI into your ecomm operations.

Parabola’s founder and CEO writes about his vision for supporting — and championing — the knowledge point people that make their businesses run.

On May 23rd, we’re hosting “If you think it, you can build it,” a virtual panel where ops leaders will show the behind the scenes take on how they’ve solved some of the toughest challenges in their careers at companies like Flexport and FabFitFun.

See how JustFoodForDogs uses Parabola to minimize stockouts and customer inquiries, decrease time spent reporting, and fill an additional $130K in orders every week.

Strategic ecommerce integration can improve SLA performance, prevent revenue leakage, increase data visibility—and even increase top-line revenue.

Parabola’s latest release lets you automate PDF parsing at scale with a smart, one-step import, so you can transform, visualize, and act on your data.

I know that we used to drive each other crazy – but we’ve both changed for the better and I think we can make things work. Hear me out.

What is inventory reconciliation? And how can you improve inventory management reporting to ultimately create a better experience for your customers?

There are many problems that can arise when you attempt demand planning and forecasting in spreadsheets — here’s how you can remedy those problems.

Automating your freight audit process is easier than you think. Take control of your audit workflows to find discrepancies, cut overcharges and save costs.

A bill of materials (BOM) overview, including what it is, examples, software, templates, and how to automate your BOM management.

PDF parsers come in many shapes and sizes — here’s how you can utilize modern tools to automate and improve data extraction.

Inventory reporting can be painstakingly manual. It’s a strategic and operational necessity, but inventory reporting processes are often stuck in spreadsheets.

Automating your inventory on hand report — whether you want to break it down by SKU, by 3PL, by parcel size — is easier than you think.

With data visualizations in Parabola, you can now report on your data, contextualize it, and show your work more easily with a customizable dashboard.

If you’re a retailer, it is now more important than ever to get the most out of your 3PL warehouse management systems and partners.

Choosing the right ecommerce warehouse management system – or WMS – for your business can yield cleaner, faster fulfillment and heightened customer satisfaction.

With the FLOW Awards, Parabola is championing the do-ers who use their ingenuity to keep businesses running — and who go above and beyond to achieve so much more. We’re finally letting operators win.

A walkthrough on how to automate with Excel Macros and how to get even more out of your Excel automation process.

Conducting a freight audit is a necessary evil when it comes to cutting costs for shippers. Here’s how to make them less manual — and more accurate.

Accounts payable automation benefits teams as much as almost any other corporate function given the chain of command needed for approvals, the repetition of tasks, and the compliance and accuracy needed.

Automating business processes is becoming more essential. RPA and BPA are well-known process automation solutions, but how do you choose the right one?

Parabola raised a $24 million Series B led by OpenView!

Here's how Juice Press built Parabola Flows that ultimately save them 400+ hours/week and $200k+/year.

Announcing a newly revamped published Flow page to make Flows more usable for your entire team.

In Parabola, you can pull data from pretty much anywhere — and now you can pull directly from PDFs (and other unstructured data sources) and automatically parse that data using our custom parsing features and AI.

You can now send, parse, and automate PDF data right in Parabola 🙌. Many of our customers have wanted to work with PDFs in their Flows like they do with spreadsheets, CSVs, and Parabola Tables, and today those wishes came true.

Parabola Flows empower non-technical teams to make quick action with structured data from multiple sources, but we know that everyday data is often messy, unstructured, or variable. Imagine if you could automatically use AI to decipher ambiguous and unstructured data, then standardize, enrich, and categorize it for you...

We just released AI transform steps, powered by GPT. Now, Operators can seamlessly use AI in their everyday workflows, enabling those who know their business challenges best to build their own solutions.

Our engineering team decided to see how many features and improvements we could build in just one week. See what we accomplished.

This 90-second video explains how freight teams like Flexport use Parabola to automate their manual freight audits.

See how our Product Design Lead, Alex Couch, uses Parabola in his free time to run statistics on University of Alabama football games.

GPT presents a ton of opportunities to leverage the power of AI in your Flows. Operators can use GPT in Parabola to create reliable solutions without having to know anything about code or machine learning.

Today, we’re thrilled to share a redesigned, super-powered toolbar for your Flows.

Today, we’re making Tables even better with groupings and aggregations. Ditch your old pivot tables in Excel and Sheets! Parabola Tables are now so much easier to create and better to view.

At Parabola, our focus this year was on collaborative features that enable you to work better as a team and show off your work. We built some amazing things together! Here’s a look back at the biggest launches of the year.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Table Views. Filter, sort, and style the output of your Flows into interactive reports. Now anyone on your team can experience the power of Parabola.

Flexport uses Parabola to save millions of dollars per year by transforming their Operations Team into high-velocity data engineers. Here’s how they did it, and how your business can do it too.

The average ERP takes 12 months to set up. Using Parabola, Fulcrum’s Launch team can implement theirs in 12 weeks. Here’s how Parabola enabled Fulcrum to onboard 3x more new customers in a year - without adding any headcount - and how your SaaS company can do it too.

We’re building Parabola to empower operators, which is only possible with true alignment between business and tech teams. Parabola has a robust set of features in place to promote oversight across data ingestion, transformation, and export. This is a significant improvement over processes that have historically included CSV exports and spreadsheet work, which is largely hidden to tech teams. Here’s how it works.

Return on Ad Spend, also known as ROAS, is used to gauge the effectiveness of your ad campagins. This metric is necessary when making decisions around ad spend. It can also be used in combination with different reports to get a full picture of how your business is performing.

Operators are fueled by ingenuity and determination to make things happen and when businesses confront tough challenges, they turn to Operators.

Today, we’re excited to announce Parabola Tables: a home for the output of your Flows. Flows are already the repository for core processes and logic, and now they are also the repository for the final product – the result of all that work you automated.

Having a strong understanding of your inventory at all times is a must. One of the more crucial times to track this is when your inventory first arrives at your warehouse. Auditing your newly arrived inventory ensures that you are receiving the quantity you’ve ordered and are able to fulfill your customers’ orders.

The Parabola team has been working hard in 2022! So hard that we might have skipped writing a Spring update 😅. But it’s summer now, and we’re looking back at all the things we’ve been building so far this year.

Understanding your customers is incredibly important when planning for and maintaining your business. When considering how much to spend to acquire new customers, your current customers’ average LTV is an important metric to keep in mind. It is often easier to maintain a relationship with a current customer than it is to acquire a new one.

Traditionally, workflows tend to live in a few “analog” locations: spreadsheets, co-workers’ brains, and sometimes literal paper and sticky notes. Let’s talk about why moving workflows into the Browser, instead, is a huge deal!

Even if your organization has a really excellent data science and engineering team we think you should still be excited about Parabola. It gives everyone the ability to customize data workflows in a way that's safe. When the workflows are legible between the team everyone starts to get better ideas. And finally, you will save lots of valuable data- and engineering-team time. To illustrate why, let’s look at a simple use case involving inventory.

Excel and Google Sheets are basically payday lenders for operational debt. They offer a quick and dirty solution for basically any operational problem with near-zero repeatability. But they’re taking on debt that will quickly manifest in a handful of forms.

Dealing with data from HR or Workforce Management software isn’t always easy, which is why it often ends up siloed away from all the other critical info within your business. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Watch this 5-minute tutorial to learn more.

Even the best plans regarding freight tend to change when the boats hit the water. But that’s no reason you can’t have a complete, real-time view into your in-transit freight — by SKU and by destination, no less. Watch this 5-minute walkthrough to find out how.

Managing pending ecommerce orders manually is no fun. In this 5-minute tutorial you’ll learn how you can set up a repeatable, shareable, automatic flow to grab all your stuck orders and turn them into actionable team AND customer alerts.

Have you noticed that the number of new customers Facebook and Google say they’re sending you each day don’t always align with your ecommerce sales data? Here’s how you can use Parabola to automate a true-up. Get the right answer quickly and automatically every day.

Parabola is an excellent tool — there’s a reason I’m so excited to work here! — but there’s no getting around the fact that users have to consume a lot of information to successfully automate a workflow. We use modals to help solve for that.

By building a Parabola Flow, I’m able to keep my Design team’s browser width breakpoints up-to-date and accurate, giving us consistent confidence that we’re designing for the right screen sizes. This simple automation saves me hours and gives me access to fresh data I otherwise wouldn’t have.

Inventory forecasting isn’t easy, but Parabola makes this often-complicated process repeatable, understandable, and automate-able. Read more to learn about Inventory Forecasting, and to see a breakdown of a Parabola Flow that automates the process.

In-transit inventory, also known as pipeline inventory, refers to inventory that has been purchased and is en route to a physical store, warehouse, or distribution center. Though this inventory hasn’t been received at a physical location, it is still included as part of a brand’s overall inventory levels.

Running an inventory process for an ecommerce business is a drag… but Parabola can help! Take a look at this video walkthrough to learn how you can move your manual inventory work into automated Parabola Flows:

As we look ahead to 2022, we look back on our major investments of 2021: bolstering team collaboration, making Flow building more delightful and powerful, and launching new integrations.

We can't quite believe it's already November and the holidays are around the corner. The team released some big product updates in the last few months to make Parabola a more powerful place to work together with your team.

It's been an exciting month of product updates at Parabola HQ, with some highly anticipated feature releases, not to mention visual & performance improvements! Headlining these feature releases is our new "Send to Airtable" step, along with our new FTP integration. Make sure to also take a peak at our new website!

Our CEO, Alex Yaseen, joined Shopify Expert Steve Hutt's eCommerce Fastlane podcast to talk about how Shopify stores such as Volcom, Great Jones, and UMZU are unlocking new levels of productivity through data automation. 

We're wrapping up 2020 with some new features and offerings, and putting a bow on some projects that have been in the works for a while. Fresh visual update to steps, new Shopify features, updated find and replace, and more!

As the end of 2020 is quickly approaching, our whole team is heads down working to make steps even easier and more intuitive to use, improve the early experiences for new customers, and supplement all of that work with revised, consolidated educational resources to help all customers get more out of Parabola (more to come on this one very soon!).

It's been an exciting month at Parabola, with some major launches and various product improvements to show for it!First, we introduced out Facebook Ads Integration, which gives you the ability to pull in over 400 unique metrics from Facebook.

Our Shopify integration is officially out of beta and now available to all users! Not only that, but we also made some useful updates to make it easier to work with dynamic dates, to be able to filter for unfulfilled orders, and we improved the experience of pulling in order-level data. That's not all! We also added support for calculating and issuing refunds with our Send to Shopify step. Now you can take a list of items, and their orders, and issue refunds automatically.

Former head of operations at Birchbox, Rent the Runway, and Shyp and co-founder of leading ecommerce consultancy Second Marathon, Matt Hertz provides

Today, there are two very different kinds of computer users: those who manually operate a computer via much drudgery and those who program computers to do work for them. Most of the benefits have accrued to those who can program a computer, but Parabola is here to help the others.