Last week on Let's Talk Supply Chain, I was joined by Tiffany of Blue Yonder, the world leader in digital supply chain and omni-channel commerce fulfillment.We had Anne-Marie on the show back in July to give us a great introduction into Blue Yonder.
That was episode 417 if you want to go and check it out. So this time, Tiffany and I took on a big industry topic instead, synchronizing supply chain execution.
We talked about the big challenges in the industry right now, the impacts on businesses, the importance of building resilient and agile infrastructures in tackling those challenges, the paradigm shift that's desperately needed to help drive change, and how Blue Yonder is helping clients to focus on the customer, reduce spend, and drive growth.
Synchronization and unification are big talking points in the industry right now.So it was really great to get an insider's take on the power of bringing supply chain together to achieve resilience and agility.
So I hope you enjoyed the show, but if you missed it, you can catch up over on letstalksupplychain.com, on our YouTube channel, or anywhere else that you subscribe to the show.It was episode 434.
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Hello and welcome back to Let's Talk Supply Chain.So let's start with a bit of a brain teaser.Today's guest is the spreadsheet alternative.
But according to reports, what percentage of supply chain managers use Excel spreadsheets to manage their operations?We've talked about this before, so we know it's high.But what do you think?
Let me know your guesses over on social and keep listening because I'll let you know at the end of the show. So today I'm joined by a brand that are dedicated to creating solutions for the problems you've always wanted to solve.
Founded in 2017, they already work with industry mega brands like Flexport and Uber Freight.But who are they?Well, I'll reveal them all after the question of the week.
So, we ask the community a question every single Wednesday morning on Let's Talk Supply Chain LinkedIn.And this week's question, how important is networking in your supply chain strategy?Now, we had over a hundred and twenty votes for this one.
Sixty-six percent of you said essential for success.Twenty-seven percent, which I am very surprised at, said it's important but it's not a focus. 6% of you said sometimes useful and 2% of you said not a priority.
Now Chris says networking is essential for career professionals in supply chain.The manager today can be a candidate tomorrow.The supplier today can be a customer tomorrow and it's so so true.I was recently talking to a
CEO of a company that could be transitioning out into potentially consulting.
And I said to them, and they were saying that they don't necessarily network, they get lots of reactions on their posts on LinkedIn, but it's because of the title that they have today.So what does tomorrow look like?
When you go out on your own and you do consulting, what does that look like?Are people still going to react as much?Do they want to get noticed by you? you need to do the work now to be able to build out your network.Your network is your net worth.
Now Stephanie says, I agree networking is really important.Wendy says, a thousand percent important.Industries are changing every day.We can learn a lot from each other.
And the other thing to mention too is there's other ways to network other than just in person and you can do that online especially in LinkedIn.LinkedIn is a really great and safe space to be able to do that and I highly recommend
you take advantage of that on a regular basis.Well, thank you so much to everybody who weighed in on the question of the week.
Come back every Wednesday morning because we will have another question for you and you can be part of the conversation that's happening in the community.So now back to today's episode and which innovative software brand is joining me today?
Well, it's Parabola.Parabola is the spreadsheet alternative where you combine the data running throughout your company and create automated processes.
Pulling in data from any source and building logic that replicates manual day-to-day work, Parabola helps businesses to transform data and make workflows repeatable, shareable, and usable for the whole entire team.
And it's Alex Yassin, founder and CEO at Parabola that is joining me for the show.Now, prior to Parabola, Alex was a consultant at Deloitte helping brands improve and innovate their data infrastructure and processes.
So he's sure to have brought some incredible insider insights to Parabola.
So today, Alex and I will be talking all about his founder journey, Parabola and what they do, ushering in the future of spreadsheets, empowering teams with workflow control, and why if you think it, you can build it.So welcome to the show, Alex.
Hi, Sarah, great to be here.
Yes, I'm excited to have you here.Now we talk a lot about Excel in supply chain.I mean, a lot.And we know we should leave it behind, but we just can't seem to do it.So I love the fact that you're leaning into that.And you've said, you know what?
Spreadsheets are great.You understand them. But guess what?We've made an alternative that's so much better.And I think that's just music to everyone's ears.So I can't wait to find out more.Let's start talking about you.
Now you've had an interesting career, founded a few different businesses from what I understand.So give us a taste of the journey that led you to found Parabola and explain the name to us as well.
Yeah, sure, let's do it.So journey B, I grew up relatively technical.Like I taught myself how to code when I was a kid and did those types of things.I built book computers.Nice.Yeah, cool kid.
But I also, I feel like I always had a foot in both worlds.So most of my friends, most of my family, like weren't that technical person.
And so I frequently found myself in the place of trying to describe to other people, like, or walk them through how they could do the more technical thing without it feeling scary.
I think most people seem to engage with new technology with a little bit of fear, a little bit of like a lack of agency.And I usually hear people talking about, oh, my computer's like acting up or it's like doing this thing.
Like, why is it doing this thing?My browser took me to this place.And they described things like they're kind of like fighting against technology.
I think that's such a bummer because you could have such this like positive and productive and kind of like empowering relationship with technology once you know how to use it.
So I've looked at a lot of experiences through my life as trying to help explain to other people how it could actually, technology can be their friend, it can be so empowering, they can do so much more and they can ultimately be more highly leveraged, more, I don't know, capable people as a result.
I created it, so I studied both engineering and finance.I wasn't really sure which world I wanted to go into.I ended up going into strategy consulting because I was told that that was the way to see how lots of businesses work.
wasn't really the industry for me because I really wanted to be more hands-on and get to really do things.But I did learn a lot.
And I think the biggest thing I learned was there are so many really interesting, in-the-weeds, detailed, subject matter expert, whatever you want to call those people.We sometimes call them operators.
We other times call them like the knowledge point person. who know incredibly detailed how their businesses work and where all the skeletons are buried.They have all the vendor relationships.
But most importantly, they usually have a thousand ideas for how their company could do something better, how they could hit top company goals, if only they had the time or if only a tech team resourced them.So I got to know a lot of those people.
in the consulting world because I was brought in to help engage with them and help build data models and financial forecasts.
And it was just so interesting how much they knew and how hard it was for them to take that knowledge and actually put it into action in a way that had a life of its own.It wasn't just them copying and pasting in spreadsheets.
So ever since then, I've been focused on how do we build tools to help those people be self-sufficient and enable them to take that really precious knowledge locked away in their head, which should be the hardest thing in the world to achieve, is the knowledge, and actually get it out into the world and do what should be a comparatively easy thing, which is do something with technology to take action on it.
Yeah, well, I like the fact that you use the word empower because technology really should be empowering, but a lot of we've heard a lot of different stories.
We've all probably been through some failed digital transformations that and we've got scars from all of that, right?
But you're right, when we find the right technology, and it is a journey to figure out what is going to work, what's not going to work, and how you can take that to not only empower yourself to do your job right, but also the teams.
And it's terrifying for leaders because they're like, I don't want to make the wrong decision and put everybody through that.But sometimes we need to go and go through that journey to come out the other side and figure out what's right for us.
Totally.Yeah, I think the technology can be so there's so much opportunity cost, I guess, right?Because it can be very interesting.It can also sometimes like implementations take a long time.
And if you pick the wrong thing, you missed out on what could have been the right thing. I think at a larger level, like as a society, technology advancements are happening no matter what.You can't really fight that and shouldn't.
Some people, I think, and some companies feel very set up to be a huge part of the future.But most people in most companies I'm talking to don't.And they're looking around and wanting to know what are other companies doing?Are people investing in AI?
Like, I think I'm supposed to do that, but I don't know how. Uh, questions that are like, yeah, well, yeah.Or just, or like, I tried and like, I tried this one for, it doesn't seem to have changed anything.Like, am I doing this right?
Uh, and I think there's a lot of just worry about, am I going to be a successful part of the future?Or is the future going to kind of, uh, be a place where I actually like lose agency and lose, uh, you know, the other people are passing me by.
Um, and that's such an important question for people.And I also think such an opportunity to, uh, empower people to solve that problem for themselves as opposed to, you know, feeling like they're losing agency.
Yeah, well, and let's talk about that.So you were a consultant at Deloitte, and you were helping brands improve their data infrastructure and processes.And I imagine that you saw all sorts of different things.
I mean, we're only getting the tip of the iceberg with what we were just talking about.
Can you talk to us about the problems you saw, maybe the challenges we're still seeing across the industry, and how your vision with Parabola is going to help sort of tackle those?
Yeah, I think the most concrete thing I saw was that even at Fortune 50 companies, in the teams that were right in the spotlight, people were still doing incredibly non-scalable, crazy, just manual process and spreadsheets.
When I was brought in, I was usually helping build some sort of a business case or a financial model for a big decision that the company was making around
Relocating or building out a new team or doing something and they need to have like a lot of data to make that decision So I would have to dive way deep in finds the person who knew idea came from and talked to them So I got to see a lot of like how the current process was and help them design what a future process or you know Talk about a future process could be as I was right building up in those business cases There are a few kind of wild examples
One maybe outside of supply chain world that just like stands out to me, uh, I was working for one of the biggest healthcare companies, uh, for a brief project and they had, uh, changed, I think of their backend billing system and made a mistake.
And as a result, there were hundreds of thousands of, uh, claims that were coming in that weren't getting answered.Uh, like, do I, you know, Hey, I need to get like heart surgery.Like, will you pay for it?And they were like, we're getting a response.
Wow.So we were helping them just figure out what's going wrong in that responding process while a different team was helping them solve the technology problem.
And it turned out that they had, we were asking them, how do you route those types of issues to different people?And they said, oh, we have a spreadsheet for it.
We call it Craig's List because it was a guy named Craig from five years ago who had built it. And it just magically outputted, you'd put in a, here's a claim, and it would have some built-in algorithm and a macro that was buried in it.
And it would tell you which team to route it to.Nobody knew how it worked.They just magically trusted Craigslist.They thought it was hilarious to call it Craigslist.
But then, as I started to work with other companies, I would see that type of a thing happening everywhere.Somebody, some enterprising, smart, subject matter expert knowledge point person somewhere had built a spreadsheet that did something.
And then that was as far forward as they pushed it and everybody else just kind of like relied on that thing.
And so I was maybe a little bit surprised as a recently out of college person to see how much of what should be like a really sophisticated industry, whether it's healthcare, I did a lot of work in logistics and CPG as well.
was just running on people emailing spreadsheets back and forth.And that was actually how so much of the world and these like really important industries was working.
Yeah, well, you know, and the biggest question is, what version are we on?Like, you're sending me 72.I thought we were on 58.
Totally, like, dash final v2 for real this time.Yeah.
And how many versions do I actually have saved on my desktop?And then when that person leaves, then what?What version are we actually on?
Right.So the people leaving ends up being a huge part of this, where there's so much establishing all that knowledge is really hard.So somebody joins, they spend two years building all this knowledge.
If they don't have a way to get that as intellectual property back out into the world of the company, when they leave, they take all that silent knowledge with them.
Yeah, yeah.And yeah, and files, like, as you don't really know, even if they turn in their laptop, you don't know where their files are.And you don't know where they left off.Right.
So that takes a lot of time, energy, resources and money, just to get back to sort of where you were before that person left.So talk to me about what exactly Parabola does.And how do you help your customers?
Yeah. When people are at these sophisticated companies, when people are still sending spreadsheets or PDFs or other things like that around, it's not because they don't want to do it differently.
Probably they've tried one of those tech implementations you're talking about and they set up an ERP and they were told that an ERP is going to solve everything.And it actually only solved maybe 10% of the most common use cases across the ops team.
But there's really a ton of other stuff happening. maybe they tried to automate with a lighter weight automation tool, and that works for a few things, but the really complex things didn't happen.
More frequently, there's just types of work that involve a lot of unstructured data that changes regularly.
So commercial invoices coming in, you start working with a new event, a new 3PL, if you're an e-commerce brand, and they send you a report in a different kind of a way, and it's in a CSV file that has some
return reasons typed in and they're not always the same.It's just like a text field.There's like all kinds of places where changing data that's also frequently kind of unstructured comes in.
That's really hard to work with even if you do have a tech team who knows how to code and can answer those things.
I mean, you're a supply chain expert.You're not necessarily a technology and Excel.As much as we want to know everything about Excel and do everything that Excel can do, we really want people to be supply chain experts.
Totally.And also the tech team is the opposite, right?They, they are technology experts, but they are not supply chain experts.And we also want them to be technology experts.
And so even if you, the supply chain expert have someone who knows how to code who, you know, sitting at your desk dedicated 24 seven to like solving your problems, they're still not the right person to solve some types of problems where the,
requirements change so often that before they finish writing the code for it, the requirements have already changed.
And you need the person who has that vendor relationship and knows why they started sending you the CSV file that has a different column in it or why you would need to start using a different piece of information.
You, who have that in your head, have to also be the person who's able to make changes.
So I never really thought about that from the technology side and how frustrating it must be.
When things are changing all of the time and they can't keep on top of it as well as keep on top of maybe even current projects that they have for other departments and things like that.That's a really good point.
Yeah, we end up talking with a lot of tech teams as part of working with our customers.And they almost always have this feeling of, you know, they're working at the company, they really want to help, they really want to say yes to things.
But like, you know, supply chain and operations teams frequently have sometimes like an adversarial relationship with their like IT or engineering counterparts, because supply chain operations is always asking for more stuff.
They're trying new things.It's such a messy world of you're swapping in and out vendors, something, whatever crazy thing happened, you need help.
Uh, the tech team wants to say yes to everything and they feel bad, but they can't keep up with that pace of how fast things are changing and how much you have to know the in the weeds details in order to implement it in code.
And so there's like, there ends up being this, this mismatch when there could instead be like a really nice compatible, you know, tech data team can build things that.
make it easier, and then give the operations team the tools to be able to do things themselves.So, you know, those types of use cases that are stuck in that manual world, to answer your original question, is like what Parallel is for.
We are, we've built a set of tools, drag and drop tools, that with some of them that help you do some of those like little tasks you would do in a spreadsheet, so find and replacing, copying and pasting, doing a VLOOKUP.
Others that handle dealing with unstructured data.So they have AI tools to, uh, take a PDF and extract the important information and get it into a thing that looks like a spreadsheet and do that in a consistent way.
Even when the PDF is changing shape or when the information's on page four rather than page one, it can kind of like intelligently handle those things.
So some AI tools, some normal tools resulting in being able to actually automate those kinds of more complex and trench tasks.
So before we go on, you did mention AI and I want to ask you about this because I have a lot of companies that come on this show and talk about what they do and how they solve for problems and that they do have an AI component.
So it sounds like you've got a number of AI capabilities in the product.How do you think about AI as a tool in operators stacks or how are you using AI?Because a lot of people are talking about using AI.
And so I just want you to describe that a little bit for the audience so that they get an understanding of how you think about it and how you actually put it in the product to help operators.
Yeah.I think we have like an interesting, we've seen like before AI World and after, or during maybe AI World, how our customers have changed the way they work.I think that could actually answer a little bit of this.
We existed as a product before the newer large language models were as good as they are.
And so for use cases like I was just talking about, if you're an operator and you're trying to do, you're on the supply chain team and you're trying to do like a freight audit and you're like an inbound freight audit, you have some commercial invoices you're looking at and a few other things.
There are a bunch of different pieces like documents that you are regularly coming into your inbox that you have to somehow get into a spreadsheet to then perform some sort of reconciliation and audit on.
So there's both data parsing stuff and also some logic of how you combine that data and create a report on the other side.
Taking those PDFs, parsing them, if that PDF comes in every single time in a really consistent way, you have a total dollar amount you're looking for is always 500 pixels down and 400 pixels over.There's a few different tools you could use.
You could hire somebody who could just say, always grab me that number.There's older school automation tools where you can say, take your mouse and go 500 pixels down and 400 pixels over and then grab that number.
But usually what happens is the shape of that PDF changes pretty often.It might be on a different page.Sometimes, like what we'll see, it's a screenshot of a photo that a truck driver took on their lap of a half crumpled up piece of paper.
And that changes way too much to be able to handle those things. prior to large language models being good, there really wasn't a solution to that.You just had to have human teams dealing with those things.That was me.
I mean, I was in logistics and freight forwarding when I was still using some typewriters.So that was me.
Totally.And just like having to do your best to keep up and typing as quickly as possible and like looking at doing data entry. Nobody's favorite job.And so AI has started to make it possible to take that document and parse it.
And so, whereas prior to our Jagex models, we would see people pulling in that document with old school tools where they would try their best and they would have to build a really complicated flow to say, to have all kinds of conditional logic for if that total, you know, was it a different page or different number.
What, as we've started to build, AI more into our product.We've prioritized the data injection part, so we have a PDF parsing step that you can either email us a file or you can upload a PDF or there's other ways you can send us information.
You can just say what the information you're looking for is.
And we use a few different layers of AI models, some like older school things like OCR, a vision-based large language model, and a few other pieces to basically slice up that PDF, ask a bunch of questions related to the data you're expecting to have come out.
And we can really consistently, even if it's the craziest, messiest photo of a screenshot of whatever document, we can actually extract a really consistent spreadsheet that just says, here's your line items, here's your total, here is your fuel surcharge or whatever the items you're getting from here.
And it'll happen every single time successfully.
And so that has helped people create, with just plain language, there's like typing, you know, in whatever their language, usually English, I guess, for most of our customers, what they're looking for, and it can extract that really consistently.
So we've mostly prioritized AI features that help deal with unstructured data.And I think that's some of the places where the messiest use cases come from in the supply chain world.
Well, I just interrupt for one second.I mean, if I could get somebody to or AI to read a document and I didn't have to read it and it just extracted the data that I needed.I mean, I'm in.
Yeah, right.So we find that that's what gets people really excited.I think downstream you still have to do something with that data.And so we've also built a bunch of tools that help you take action.
So you can combine that with data coming out of NetSuite and maybe like a report somebody built in Looker.
You can merge all that data into one place and then actually build a report or create a Slack notification or whatever the thing is you want to do from there.I think combining those together is important.
Like the ability to work with, to grab that data and then also the ability to action on it.
Yeah, it's the action part, right, is that we need to be able to utilize that to take action, to be able to move things forward and keep them moving forward.
Now, in the introduction for this particular episode, I talked about the fact that you are working with customers like Flexport and Uber Freight.I mean, those are some big names, particularly impressive for a brand that's only about seven years old.
Parabola is clearly the solution, you know, a lot of companies were looking for.So do you only work with larger organizations?
Do you have an ideal customer that you can share with me and the audience so that if they are interested, they know whether they're the right fit?
Yeah, so the problems I'm describing, lots of PDFs and spreadsheets flying around, you were describing a bunch of different version 27 of a file that you don't know is their file.
Those types of issues tend to arise when there's a little bit of operational complexity inside of a company.And that usually is from having a few people working on a problem and trying to coordinate across teams.
Our best customers probably are at least about 100 people as a result, just because they've They have some of that operational complexity.They have tried some solution.
They've already tried to implement an ERP or something, and they've realized that here's the set of things in ERP that's really great at solving, and here's the set of things that we still have a bunch of operations people stuck doing manually, typing in whatever PDF data entry we were just talking about.
And we can then solve that subset of the structurally difficult to automate processes we're really good at handling.So we love to work with people who've already identified what those are.So it depends on your world.
If it's a D2C e-commerce brand, it's probably around 100 people. maybe a little bit less depending on other companies, maybe grow complexity faster.
And then we, so we work with a lot of brands in that few hundred people kind of size up to some of the largest brands. If you're a smaller company who's trying to get like ahead of some of those problems can also be interesting.
You can sign up on our website and actually get started, uh, on your own if you're just kind of an individual user.Uh, but usually it's like the most valuable answer about a hundred to thousand person company.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.So go and check that out.Go to their website.I'm going to mention it at the end of the show.But let's talk also about the product itself, right?
We've now talked about who your ideal customer is, how they can get started with you, but also where it makes the most sense, which is great.
And also at the beginning of the show, I said, if you think it, you can build it because that's something that I believe you say and sort of stand by.How does that work?Like talk us through the process, which I presume is as intuitive as Excel.
but a little supercharged.We've kind of heard tidbits from what we've already talked about, but bring that all together for us.
Hopefully as easy or easier to use than Excel.So our entire tool looks a little bit like a flowchart.I personally think in flowcharts, my team makes fun of me for that.
But I think a lot of operations supply chain folks think about processes and flowcharts.So you would drag and drop a bunch of different steps for that flowchart, and they can either pull in data, transform it, manipulate it, or take action somewhere.
Uh, I was just talking about a lot of the stuff that helps you pull in data so we can connect to the simple things like Google Sheets and NetSuite and Shopify and wherever your data might be.
Um, but I think the most interesting one for supply chain folks is like our most common step is we give you a dedicated email address.Like every one of these flowcharts gets an email address.
You can just CC us on emails or have auto forwarded emails too. And we'll grab all the data from the body of the email, the text in the email from many CSV files that are attached, many PDFs that are attached.
And we have a lot of tools that help parse all that stuff out.You don't have to know how that's working by user.You just say, I want to grab all the information from this email.
And I'm expecting a bunch of line items and a tax amount and a total amount.And we do all the hard work behind the scenes of figuring out how to extract that stuff out and give it to you in what looks like a simple table.
And so in terms of being easier to use than Excel, hopefully you're kind of just describing to us by dragging and dropping those steps. Process kind of the way you would describe it to somebody you hired on your team.
If you hired an analyst on your team, you were onboarding them week one, you would say, here's an SOP.We take these 15 steps and we do this thing.
And I copy and paste these three different, I go to this portal, I copy and paste this thing, I paste it in a spreadsheet.I do a find and replace to remove the prefix on these SKUs that's all messy.Whatever, I do a few of those steps.
Each one of those things is a step in Parabola.And you don't have to learn any complex formulas or other things.You're just describing the like manual tasks you would have taken.We can kind of take that and turn that into an automated process.
So I kind of think about my relationship with HubSpot because we use HubSpot, right?And there's a Chrome extension.I'm guessing you don't have a Chrome extension.
But still, when I send out emails and I want to track and trace them, I cc HubSpot and all the information gets turned into the system, and into a contact, and a company, and an organization, and maybe a task, and like all this kind of stuff.
So that's how I kind of think about it.But I think you guys need a Chrome extension.That should be next on your list.
Yeah, until I grab more of the information.Definitely interesting.Any website you're on, you can press the button and then just grab it.That would make sense.
I love that.So let's talk about that integration piece.I just mentioned Chrome extensions and how it sort of reminds me of my relationship with HubSpot right now.And integration is top of mind, right?
It's top of mind for technology professionals, technology leaders, supply chain leaders, because you're talking about messy documents and sort of information all over the place, a range of tools and apps and emailing it.
But the integration piece, does that come with the email or is there more to it that we need to think about when we're looking to work with Parabola?
When working with any of the software, I think people hear the word integration and they get really scared because it's normally a big, long process.
You do have to go work with your IT team and they're going to be mad at you that you're trying to integrate more stuff than they already have.That's where the time-intensive part comes in buying and using software.
We really want to do things differently where we don't, if you are talking to us and you have a problem you want to solve, it's probably like a really urgent problem and operations supply chain folks like to get things done like today and because things are changing so frequently.
And so we really try to like help make that thing happen.So ideally, if you have a problem, you know how to solve it already, you just need the like technical help to do it. like, tomorrow you should be able to solve that problem.
And so we have lots of integrations.So wherever you're, again, I've been talking about NetSuite or Shopify or Looker, all the different, you know, Snowflake, wherever your data might exist.
We've already pre-built a lot of those things so you can just sign in and it'll automatically connect.We build it in a way where you can, you the supply chain person can do that without having to get IT involved.
But rather than to avoid kind of like the long complex integration time of like other types of systems, which we can do, but like the way most people do it is they try to integrate on this like email level.
Like if you're in supply chain, you already are getting this data somehow.It usually is getting sent into your email or something similar.Maybe some people text you things if it's like a really. Maybe Snapchat at some point.
I haven't had a Snapchat one.But we see a lot of people like talking with their manufacturing partners via WhatsApp.That's like obviously really common.So like those types of things, that's already how people are interfacing.
And so we just try to meet you where you are and make it really easy to get those types of messages into Bravo.And that actually becomes the integration point.
And you can set that up, you know, five minutes after you sign up for Bradley, you can have that integration already working because you're connecting the like email or the other type of messaging.
Yeah, I love that.Super easy, right?That's what it needs to be.It needs to be simple for people to get started and kind of go in and see what it's all about and how the technology can help you specifically.
Now, we've talked a lot about individuals and how they can use Parabola in a variety of different ways. But I think your system can also do a lot for teams, and I believe it's scorecarding and management to audits, track and trace.
Can you bring that into the picture for me and talk a little bit about how you help supply chain teams do that?
Yeah. can build anything you could do in a spreadsheet process that you describe, you could end up doing in Parabola.
Uh, the things we do really well describing are the things where you need to pull in some kind of probably somewhat unstructured data and make sense of it and combine it with other stuff from throughout your company.
The use cases you're talking about, um, are that way, if you're doing track and trace or freight audits, like you're sometimes grabbing, uh, like CSV files that have a report of where all of your containers are.
Sometimes you're pulling in a specific PDF that has information you have to parse and sometimes you're looking that up in NetSuite or Snowflake or Google Sheet that somebody made that they'd like keep and they'd send to you every once in a while.
So we're helping, you know, the, you know, supply chain analyst who's working on reconciling all that they can build something out in Bravo.
Uh, they can do it quite quickly, but the way we start to interface with the whole team is that flow chart that you build is actually really descriptive of how the process works. One of the places, so we were talking about AI earlier.
Some of the places we help you with AI is with the ingesting of that data.Other thing we do is we try to make the building process easier by giving you like AI assistive features.
And the place we've spent a decent amount of time recently is on documentation.
So everybody wants to have really nice SOPs, really well documented how we do things so that, as we were talking about earlier, if somebody like leaves the company or doesn't want to be the person who always has to do the thing, it's easy to like knowledge transfer it.
But the reality is nobody actually keeps things perfectly up to date.People are too busy moving too quickly and so processes get kind of like evolve without the documentation evolving alongside it.
So one of the places we use AI is we automatically document all of these processes.
So we built something in Preble and we're constantly creating rich documentation that describes here's what's happening and why, both how the thing is configured and what your data flow through looks like.
And so every time you make a change in Preble, we actually update that documentation.So you have this living SOP basically that describes what's happening. Anybody on your team can log in and find that process.
So if you want to understand how do we do inbound freight audits, you don't have to go track the person down and ask them.You can just log into Preble and see the flow that's the inbound freight audit.
It describes all the data, where it's coming from, what the logic is.And if you build a report, you can see the report right there and see exactly where that data is coming from.
Now I totally see how that helps save a lot of time.
Like think about reducing the amount of Slack messages and emails that you get from other people in the organization that have good intentions, but really you can drive them to one place to find out about so many different things that pull us from the core work that we should be doing on a day-to-day basis.
We get so distracted by all of the questions, you know, that come in about a particular
you know thing that they need information about and it just it takes us away from what we're doing and think about the just the less the least amount of distractions we could have on a day-to-day basis I think a lot of people would enjoy.
Yeah, when you're that knowledge point person, it's kind of a cool position to be in because you've figured something out and you're known within the company as the person who owns that thing.
But everybody asks you questions, everybody wants to do stuff.So certainly that way of sharing can reduce a lot of issues.I'll do two related places where people spend a lot of that distraction time.
When there's an exec meeting and they're looking at why are we spending so much money on inbound freight, which is increasingly expensive, and that is happening right now.Every CFO is like, how do I maybe try to slash some costs?
Are we being too fast and loose in how we're paying for inbound freight?Or whatever the related issue is. You look at a report and that number is increasing and the first question is like, are we actually even calculating this correctly?
Like, is it, are we even looking at the right data?
So non-parallel, just in a regular spreadsheet world, you have to call that knowledge point person into that meeting and say, like, walk me through your entire process of where does this data come from and how do you copy and paste it and whatever.
Um, and probably you're looking at the report.You can double click on the chart and you can actually just see the exactly where the data is coming from.
You can see it live updating and it creates like some transparency in the way that like helps build trust with everybody at all.So you can say either, oh, it's working totally correctly or, oh, this like works differently than I thought it did.
And now I can like have a really good conversation rather than spinning my wheels.
Yes, and asking the right questions within that conversation, right?
But some of the good distraction on that is that they can go in and sort of answer some of their questions, but to distract them from the cost center that they might see supply chain as.
Parabola, I know, has an impact for the business as a whole and sort of the bottom line that everybody's looking at.So maybe we can do a good distraction. and show them the impact on the business as a whole.
So talk to me about that because on your website, when I was doing my research for this particular episode, you know, clients are talking about reducing bottom line spend, improving productivity, saving time, giving teams ownership over those workflows, which we just talked about.
But that bottom line piece is so important.So talk to us about the impact for the overall business.
Yeah, so core to our belief, we were talking a little bit about the beginning of this, is that the operations people, the knowledge point person, are kind of like the most important person in the company.They actually know how things work.
They have all these great ideas.
They're already having a lot of impact probably today just doing things manually, but they could have a hundred times, a thousand times the impact if they got more of these things out of their head and out working within the company.
And so we're trying to shine a spotlight on them and just say, you operations person who has all the knowledge, that's the impressive hardware thing in the world.Being able to do technology stuff should be easy.
It just so happens that it isn't today.But ideally, what we're doing, the easy part.But our operations person is really the hero, both of the things that they're building in this case, and also for their company at large, hopefully.
Our best users have a really great track record of getting promoted pretty quickly within companies.We think it's really cool.
They start to have a lot more impact on just like they are saving a bunch of money and people notice or there's like a really awesome customer.
If it's a CPG brand and they're trying to deliver some really cool faster delivery time or some interesting returns process or something that has like a big impact on the customer experience.
Operations team can sometimes actually say, yes, we can actually help you do that.It's not just some crazy idea marketing had.And they become the hero of being able to make that happen.
And so we're really shining a spotlight on how great operations teams are.
And we've actually started hosting a lot of events for operators.We've noticed that like marketers get invited to lots of things, but operations teams don't.
And so we started connecting people behind the scenes who are working on similar problems and that went really well.
So now we've started hosting dinners and some slightly larger events just to get everybody to meet each other and build a little bit of a community of like, we are the operator and like, we are really, especially in 2024, 2025, like operations is like kind of the most important function in a lot of these companies.
We should do a hackathon.
Get them to break some stuff and like, you know, talk to them about what's working, what's not working.Maybe we can collaborate on that later.
But anyways, if I zoom out and I think about the industry as a whole, where do you see that impact happening in supply chain as an industry as well?We've talked about the individual, the teams, the business, but let's zoom out on the industry.
Where do you see that impact?
Few places.I think mostly the because these individuals and businesses who are starting to adopt technology are having so much success.If you are not, there is that risk of being left behind.And so I think the
there's a little bit more divergence or something of how companies are interfacing, like the really tech-enabled smart companies are able to be really, they can work with multiple 3PLs and they can really help route items to the right places and be really smart about how they do that and deliver awesome customer experiences.
They can do things like omni-channel fulfillment has been a thing that we're hearing a lot of our companies wanting to do.So if they have retail stores, they want to be able to ship stuff out of their retail stores.
That is data integration complicated, but doesn't have to be.
Companies who are investing in technology to be fast, nimble, try things out like that can try that out in a few weeks and all of a sudden see what it's like to be able to ship from their stores and what the customer experience looks like.
Companies that don't invest in technology, that could be a three-year aspirational, everybody talks about it for three years, nothing ever happens, and eventually maybe somebody tries to do it.
And so I think the speed of making some of those decisions, trying some of those things, and the compounding effects has this really interesting, some companies are moving crazy fast right now, and some less so.
I think there's like, uh, that, that ends up impacting a lot of like what, what it feels like in the industry.Uh, and then I think there's an interesting piece on.The providers themselves.
So on the three PLS or the freight providers, um, there's a little like relationships are, are always really important.Um, but I think, uh,
In a world where the data is increasingly, I don't know, maybe like fungible, it's a little bit easier to swap between three PLLs or swap between freight forwarders.
Uh, I think to some extent, like differentiating based on something is really important.So that's the relationship or the quality of the way you provide insight into your data.
It requires, uh, it's putting the pressure, I think, on some of those providers to, um, really deliver excellent service so that it's, uh, you're not just stuck using them due to like lock-in, you're using them because you really want to be using them.
Yeah, well, yeah, and that focus on relationship has been important previously, but then I think now it's about data, right?
It's about how do we integrate, how do we partner, how do we share feedback and integrate the data and do the things that we need to do to make both of us be successful and drive not only our teams, our businesses, but the industry forward as well.
So now, this is one of my favorite parts of the conversation, because I just want you to paint us a picture of maybe a case study, how you've worked with a customer.What was the problem that they came to you with?
What was the solution that you provided?And what was the ROI and benefit that you can share with us?You don't have to share names, but just so that we can get an insider's view into what success has looked like for one of your customers.
Yeah.Um, so we were just talking about inbound freight logistics.I think that's like an interesting, um, easy kind of like easy one to think about the potential, um, benefits of.So, uh, I think I maybe won't name names on this one.
Uh, this was a like 300 or 400 ish person.Um, uh, retail brands, they sell online and, and through stores, uh, Inbound freight was historically something that they weren't optimizing for because freight costs were a little bit lower.
Um, they were increasing their skews, uh, a bit and also freight costs just went up a lot.And their CFO was saying like, this is kind of the exact thing I was just talking about.I think their CFO is saying.
This is all of a sudden become like a larger line item.Like what is, is all of this shipping necessary?Like, are we actually, have we negotiated our contracts while whatever, and there was just a lot of scrutiny and oversight.
How many meetings do we need to talk about this?
Yeah, totally.Just like it was it was kind of like creating a lot of tension between teams and also there was just a lot of kind of unmet.
And they had never really done a sophisticated audit of how much is this costing and what could other options be.That could be a really scary
This is going to be a months long project and it's going to totally derail us from all of our other things, right?
They had just started using parabola for for a few smaller use cases and so why don't we see if we can use probably here so they started routing all of their. invent freight data into PrEP where they built a flow that reconciles all of it.
And they were able to just like come up with like a really quick audit to say like, actually, like you're right, here's a few places where we were kind of, we made a good decision a year ago and things were cheap, and now it's gotten kind of expensive.
And I think there were a few ROI.So like we talked a lot about the ROI of saving money.So a lot of our customers who are, you know, we get a lot of customers into the multiple millions of dollars of ROI of saving money.
But this particular company, the reason I'm highlighting this, came up with a few other interesting ROI components.
One was this director of operations, who's leading this project, started to have a much larger seat at the table in leadership conversations after they did this, because they were like, oh, you understand the business, and you reacted really quickly, and it helped raise her profile within the company.
Her team also, the performance review they did six months before, had talked about how there really wasn't the employee engagement part of it.
People were saying they didn't really have the tools they needed to get their job done and were getting burnt out doing a lot of manual stuff.
And after building some of these things out in Parabola, the next performance review that was six months later, I think like 85 or 90% of the team said, actually, now we do have all the tools that we need to do our job.
And there was a lot more like the job satisfaction metric had gone up a lot.And she, the manager, looked like really great as a result.
And those are like these really interesting pieces of ROI that were kind of more grassroots that are not what I think a lot of AI or data companies talk about.
And so certainly, like we like to talk in our case studies on our website about the millions of dollars of cost saved or like revenue accelerated.But I kind of think the
The human component of that, of the increasing profile within a company, the employee dissatisfaction, in some ways is the more differentiated, interesting ROI.
I'm so glad that you brought that up because I talk about this all the time, the ROI isn't just down to the dollars.And I read this interesting stat that digital transformation is only 20% technology and it's actually 80% change management.
And so when you talk about the ROI in those terms and you understand that a digital transformation or taking on a new technology and working with a new technology is really only 20% the technology, then those ROIs that you just shared actually goes up exponentially because that 80% means you got 80% of that regardless of the technology.
You got 80% of that right. And that's a really big deal to be able to get the team on board and together and move forward in a cohesive direction.So I appreciate you for sharing that.
Now, I can't believe we're at the end of this, but I do want to ask you, lastly, you know, what do you think that we can expect coming up in 2025?Maybe there's some insights that you can share
maybe on what Parabola is doing, maybe in the AI space, like what's getting you excited about 2025 around technology and AI.Just share with us.We just like to get everybody's perspective on what you're keeping an eye on.
Yeah, I think it's definitely AI.Technology in general, obviously changing a lot, AI is the thing that feels like it's changing the fastest.I think it's top of mind for so many people because it feels a little unknown and it's moving so fast.
So I think that's probably why that comes up the most.But yeah, I think technology overall, AI specifically, is only going to increase the pace of change in 2025.
And I think changing the way companies are able to think about costs and what's the hard thing to do within a company.We've talked a little bit about this.
I think increasingly the hard thing within any of these companies is actually knowing the problem, actually having a set of vendors that are ideally set up for you.
If you are one of those vendors, having that awesome relationship we're talking about and providing the right data and being an amazing partner. And all of the other stuff is going to increasingly get easy.
So as AI models become more powerful and it becomes really easy to parse those documents and hopefully people are using a lot of parabola flows to automate those parts of their business.
It's the knowledge of what actually is the important thing within your company.
people on your team who have been there for a couple of years and actually know where the skeletons are buried and are empowered and motivated to help solve those problems.That's going to be the really rare and difficult thing in the world.
And so companies who are great at cultivating their people and kind of empowering them are going to rise to the surface.And you were talking a little bit how relationships used to be really important and now it's more about the data.
I think it's actually coming around a little bit as a circle. these newer AI models let you interface with technology kind of the way you interface with the person.So we do a lot of our stuff via email.
I think that's actually really nice because you interface with other people via email.And so if increasingly you can just send an email to a piece of software saying, please do this, and it actually does it.That also works across vendors.
Like if you're emailing your freight forwarder, and a Flexport thinks a lot about this.Like if you're one of Flexport's customers, Uh, they want you to be able to just send them an email or a CSV file or something, and they take it from there.
Um, they use Pravla to do some of those things.Um, uh, that actually is going back to just like having a really nice relationship.That's a little bit more human, a little bit more just like casual conversation.
And the people who get really good at that inside of companies or as like relationships across companies, uh, I think are the people who are going to rise to the top.So like that, that is going to become increasingly important, maybe again in 2025.
So hand-in-hand relationships and data.
Well, data is everywhere across our businesses and spreadsheets, PDFs, e-mails, Post-its, and in an increasingly complex supply chain landscape, it's getting harder and harder to get our houses in order to pull all of this data together so we can make deep strategic decisions.
Well, that's why you need Parabola.Now, pull data in from anywhere and use their canvas to combine and transform that data.Take control of your workflows.
share them with the right people at the right time, and ultimately create solutions for the problems you've always wanted to solve.Now, did you have a guess at today's big question?
Well, at the top of the show, I asked you what percentage of supply chain managers use Excel spreadsheets to manage their operations.Well, It's a huge 67.4%.I think that went up because I think the last time I mentioned that number, it was 61%.
So supply chainers, we know you love Excel, but now you have a viable alternative with Parabola.So get involved.And if you want to get involved, find out more, you can check them out at parabola.com.
And if you'd like to hear more from us, we have plenty more content for you featuring the best and brightest in the industry.Head over to letstalksupplychain.com to find out more.
Now, a massive thanks to the team at Parabola for making this episode happen.And Alex, thank you so much for joining me today.
Yeah, thanks, Sarah.Great chatting.
Did you know that the average cost of losing an hourly supply chain worker has reached $19,607?And that recent research shows that 77% of hourly supply chain workers are considering a job change in the next three months.
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If you would like to hear more from us, you can check out LetsTalkSupplyChain.com where we have plenty more content for you featuring the best and the brightest in the industry.And remember to come back next week.
I'm going to be joined by Brian Adams, CEO of Retail Reworks and Sutton Strachey. entrepreneur, fashion founder, TV personality, and real housewives of Beverly Hills icon.That's right.
These days, even real housewives are into supply chain and Brian Sutton and I will be diving into the controversial world of sustainable fashion.We'll be exploring how Brian and Sutton got involved in the sustainable fashion business
the rise of greenwashing and how the word sustainable has become so problematic, the urgent need for a circular fashion economy, and the role supply chain can play in turning the industry on its head.So I am so, so excited for this one.
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Great week, everyone.Thanks for listening.And remember, ship happens.
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