Product creation flows
A visualization the basic logic behind product creation flows - (almost) any standardized spreadsheet task can be automated. The complexity hidden beneath a simple interface leads to significant time savings.
The challenge: scaling product creation across brands
Managing product creations across 1000+ unique brands, each with their own specifications and requirements, the traditional approach was becoming unsustainable. What should have been a straightforward process had evolved into a complex, time-consuming ordeal that took 2-3 hours per product at best of comparing the new list of products to the ones already existing in our database. Multiple stakeholders, inconsistent data formats, and brand-specific requirements created a perfect storm of simple, yet urgent tasks, that take many man hours to complete.
The situation called for more than just incremental improvements - it needed a complete rethinking of our approach.
The technical foundation: Parabola
When I stepped into my role, my team had already evaluated several automation platforms, and Parabola emerged as the ideal solution for our needs. It provided the perfect balance of flexibility and structure, while being easy to grasp and use.
The visual flow builder ensured that we could create complex data transformations that are accessible to team members without coding knowledge, as well as allowing those wanting more to delve deeper. The many predefined steps for data manipulation and the rapid pace the program manipulates data, allows us to clean, transform, and validate data faster than ever before.
Building a scalable architecture
The core insight that drove our solution was recognizing that despite surface-level differences, most brand requirements followed similar underlying patterns. While no brand sends their data in a standardised way, once the relevant fields are identified and cleaned, we are able to prepare the data much the same.