From Repair Shop to Full Parts and Service Location
This episode explores how independent repair shops are increasingly moving into parts distribution, with Fullbay providing the tools to manage inventory, workflows, and growth effectively.
Episode 357: In this episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report, host Jamie Irvine speaks with John Whittet, Chief Customer Officer at Fullbay, about the growing trend of repair shops expanding into parts distribution.
They discuss how shops often begin by stocking basic items for their own repairs and then evolve into full parts and service providers, driven by customer demand for one-stop solutions. Whittet highlights challenges such as inventory visibility, pricing control, and workflow alignment, emphasizing how Fullbay’s cloud-based platform helps shops manage real-time inventory across warehouses, retail counters, and mobile service units.
The conversation also explores the impact on staffing, the need for process mapping, and the importance of balancing cash flow with inventory management. Ultimately, the episode underscores that while expanding into parts distribution adds complexity, with the right systems and practices, shops can scale successfully and meet modern fleet expectations.
Links
Sponsors of this Episode
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Fullbay: Fullbay is built for the heavy-duty world, giving your operation the tools to keep your fleet or independent repair shop running. Features like streamlined scheduling, real-time inventory tracking, technician efficiency insights, and detailed reports are how Fullbay helps shops reduce downtime and keep your vehicles on the road where they belong. Check out Fullbay.com/power to maximize your shop’s productivity.
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Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission.
Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. My name is Jamie Irvine, and in this episode, we’re going to talk about the growing trend of repair shops moving into the parts distribution world. To help me with that, my guest today is John Whittet. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Fullbay. John, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
John Whittet
Jamie, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Jamie Irvine
So before we get into our conversation today, maybe for our audience who aren’t familiar with Fullbay, you could just give us a brief introduction to Fullbay and kind of where it sits in the marketplace.
John Whittet
Absolutely. So we’re thrilled to be here today. Fullbay is the leading cloud-based shop management platform built specifically for the heavy-duty repair industry. And so we serve the businesses that keep essential fleets and equipment running. All those unsung heroes behind freight, construction, waste, emergency services, bunch of different verticals. And so what makes us unique is we don’t just digitize that repair process. We connect the entire operation of technicians, service writers, parts managers, and accountants inside one system that’s designed specifically for heavy-duty repair. And so that means that service orders, inventory, we’re going to talk a lot about that today, invoicing and payments all flow together in real time. which drives a faster turnaround, better visibility, and a stronger bottom line for shops.
Jamie Irvine
Right, and when you think about that repair shop environment, you know, I spent a lot of years selling parts to those shops. And, these are independent business owners. They are servicing small fleets and local regional fleets. They often offer mobile repair, maybe 24-hour roadside assistance, or they’re actually going out to fleet’s yards and doing repair. And the natural kind of evolution of the business is to say, look, I’m buying a lot of parts to install on my customers’ vehicles. Maybe I should think about selling parts. Are you seeing that as a growing trend?
John Whittet
Absolutely. And a lot of shops almost stumble into it, right? You end up having a back room with a couple shelves. They’ve got screws and filters and other items on it. And you start to say, well, wait a second, that’s starting to overflow. I’ve got boxes that are laying around. I’ve got inventory that customers are asking for. And so we’ve seen a really clear trend there of repair shops that are not just staying in one lane. And so they’re realizing that they can drive a lot of really interesting growth, enter some new segments and niches, get more money from shops and fleets that are coming in the door. And in some cases, realizing that it’s a drag on their efficiency if they’re not. And so that’s adding retail parts counters, warehouse distribution. You mentioned mobile service units. In some cases, that might be specialized equipment for a certain type of truck or fleet item, something like that. Because that’s what fleets are really asking for, right? They’re looking for that one-stop partner that they can trust to do everything. They don’t want to go talk to five different shops. They want to talk to one shop that can service the truck, sell the part, deliver a mobile repair, whatever I need to deliver that complete uptime support. And so we see a lot of shops on full bay doing that. And our goal is really giving them the foundation to do that confidently. Linking work orders, inventory, all these pieces and parts make it a lot more complex to be able to keep all your operations in sync.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense when you think about the cost involved to diversify or to rather not diversify, rather scale a shop, right? You need more bays. That’s construction. That’s expensive. You need technicians, which are almost impossible to find. It is, there’s so much cost connected to scaling the service side of your business beyond where it is. I see why business owners then look at the parts and they say, well, I’m already, like to your point, I’m already stocking some of them. If I just sell more parts, I can scale that relatively easy comparatively to scaling the shop side of my business. But there’s definitely some pain points associated with moving into that business. And it’s not as simple as people sometimes think when they first look at it on the surface. So what are some of the challenges that you’ve seen Fullbay users run into when they start going down this road?
John Whittet
Well, in a lot of the cases that we see, Jamie, the number one customer, or rather the first customer of a part service department or something like that, is going to be yourself. And so this is where you start to realize that you’ve got a parts runner running up to Napa every single afternoon. Or conversely, you’ve got a stack of filters you bought six months ago and you haven’t used any of them. And so you start to say, wait a second, this is actually slowing down the jobs I’m trying to do on a regular basis. Either I’ve got a tech sitting in a bay, bay’s tied up with a truck because I’m waiting for a part to arrive. Or conversely, you say, wait a second, I’ve got $100,000 worth of inventory sitting in that back room. I’d much rather invest that in construction or a piece of specialized equipment or a down payment on a mobile truck to be able to expand. And so that kind of first customer is a really, really interesting one. But we see really three key challenges. The first is inventory visibility. And so once a shop starts pulling parts for repairs and retail sales, and you got a mobile truck, it’s really, really easy to lose track of what’s where. And so you end up over-ordering, you end up using the same part twice, you hold on to some of that dead stock. You get parts runners up and down in the shop truck every single afternoon. And so those are all the kind of issues that are going to mess up cash flow, slow down repair jobs, and going to be a drag on the entire business. And then the second is pricing and process control. And so you’ve got all these different channels. They might have different markups, different customer discounts, tax handling if you’re in different jurisdictions, maybe warranty processes, depending on what you’re selling. And so trying to do all that manually on an Excel sheet or, God forbid, a piece of paper is incredibly time consuming and really, really error prone. And then third is training workflow alignment. And so you start introducing retail, modal service, other offerings. It changes how the shop operates. It changes how technicians and part staff and advisors communicate both internally and with customers. And so we’re really trying to help solve that with some of these consistent processes, some user-friendly automations that keeps everybody on the same page as your business gets more and more and more complex.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and I’ve definitely seen that with clients of mine where all of a sudden now they’re looking at this from a different perspective and they’re saying, you know, before we had this workflow in our business where parts came in from our suppliers, they went to the individual bay where the part was going to be installed, the technician installed that part, we invoiced accordingly, and we were done. But to your point, now all of a sudden, when you’ve got parts going all over, you’ve got parts on a mobile truck, you’ve got parts in the shop, you’ve got parts in the warehouse, you’ve got parts maybe up front in the retail store, and then… someone on the parts counter goes to sell a part, they go to the warehouse, it’s not there. Where is it? Well, it’s on a mobile truck. It’s in the shop.
John Whittet
Where did I put that O-ring anyway? Yeah.
Jamie Irvine
Right. Or it was or it was used six weeks ago. Nobody accounted for it. And all of a sudden now we have a situation where we can’t serve our customer. So how does Fullbay address that flow more specifically? Can you go into more detail on that?
John Whittet
So all of our parts are managed in real time. So our goal is to be the single source of truth for all of your inventory management. And so every single part, it’s used on a job, it’s got a purchase order against it, it’s sold over the counter, it’s in the warehouse, it’s all tracked in real time. And so we offer kind of bin and location management. Again, where is that O-Ring? We really encourage a lot of our customers to get into cycle counting, be able to understand, did I sell that six weeks ago or do I still have it in stock? Enabling things like barcode scanning, make some of those processes faster. And so our goal is to give really full control and visibility into that stock. And you mentioned locations, and that’s a really, really important one as well, because yeah, you’ve got, maybe it’s the bin in the shop, it’s the distribution center you’re doing e-commerce sales out of, it’s the front desk, it’s the mobile truck. And so even things like mobile service units, we treat like mini warehouses. Every single thing is in its place, and it’s an area that you can track and you can manage. So that when a technician pulls a part in the field, that inventory automatically deducts everywhere, real time. So you can say, yep, we just did a job. That part’s coming out of inventory. And maybe we need to take an action off that. Maybe it’s time to reorder because we’ve hit our minimum threshold. Maybe this is a special order part, in which case we’ve got an invoice for it. So the goal is really that one platform, that complete visibility, no surprises on where any of this stuff is.
Jamie Irvine
It’s time to hear from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.
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Make sure you go and check out the links in our show notes to all of our sponsors. Okay, let’s get back to this episode. We’re back from our break. Before the break, I think we did a good job of establishing kind of the trend of where a lot of independent repair shops are moving into the parts distribution world. We talked a bit about how Fullbay provides that kind of single source of truth, that one-stop shop. Let’s talk about how this shift, when a repair shop makes that shift, let’s talk specifically how it might impact staffing. So we talked before about when you’re trying to scale the repair side of the business is really challenging because you have to try to find technicians, you have to maybe construct new bays or a bigger building. When you go into the parts world, it does have an impact on staffing. How have your Fullbay users been addressing those concerns?
John Whittet
Well, I think you mentioned before the break, Jamie, that the core workflow of shop is usually pretty linear before you start expanding. And so you’ve got technicians, they’re pulling a part, they’re completing the job, it’s done, on to the next. And so this kind of shift into parts, into other service areas really transforms your core operations. And you’ve got to really have your core operations down pat. And then you’ve got to realize that your customers are now expecting the same level of transparency and speed that they’re getting from Amazon, right? They’re looking for reliable quotes, they want to know where their shipment is, they want to know when they can pick it up from the shop, they want clear communication, they want digital approvals, they want streamlined payments, they want all of this. And this can be a brand-new world for some shops that may be used to a customer walking in or used to receiving an emergency phone call in the middle of the night, taking a credit card, taking a cash or even a check. It’s a brave new world once you start getting into this. And so this means that your shop floor, your front counter, your back office, it’s one team more so than ever. And in a lot of cases, different kinds of roles. And so your parts manager isn’t a parts manager anymore, they’re kind of a supply chain strategist. What does that mean? Your service writers aren’t doing paperwork anymore. They’re managing digital workflows and probably multiple at a single time. You’ve got techs that may be historically on a clipboard or a piece of paper, they’re on tablets, they’re balancing jobs, they’re scheduling things in real time, they’re ordering parts digitally, as opposed to walking over to the parts window. And so connecting all of those roles, all of those processes in your shop, the quotes, the approvals, the part usage, the POs, the invoices, the receivables, the warranties, that coordination is another level of complexity for a lot of growing shops, but conversely, that’s what modern fleets are expecting. And you go look at a really top shop, the guys are getting a ton of fleet business, the guys that are knocking on all cylinders, that’s what these top shops are delivering. And so embracing the technology, embracing the process workflows, structuring their teams around these data-driven processes, that becomes the evolution for a lot of these growing shops as they go from maybe a single workflow, we’re just doing repair jobs, now into, I’ve got a lot of different techs, I might have multiple locations, I’ve got different service lines. You’re building not only a business, but a process and a structure that’s going to scale.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and actually that’s one of the things that I’ve been consulting with Fullbay users on is they now have this powerful technology stack inside of the Fullbay system that they can take advantage of. But now they have to develop, we use the expression value stream mapping, and it kind of started with Lean Six Sigma in manufacturing, but it has a great application to business systems. And if you actually map out the flow, the flow of information, the physical flow of the part, and you actually start to put that down inside of the business as part of like a standard operating procedure, that really helps to visualize now the digital side that Fullbay is now giving you this powerful tool, but now you’re actually visualizing like physically what’s going to happen and how it’s all going to work. And what I often find happens is it does identify areas where there is some retraining that’s needed or there’s gaps in people’s experience where they need to do some training or bring in somebody with more experience. I’ll give you 2 examples. One, that technician all of a sudden who before never had to really worry about accounting for the parts he was taking out of the parts room until the job was done. Now all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, but if I get a sale in that six hour interim from when you took the part off the shelf to install it and put it on that SO, I don’t know where the part is, I can’t sell it, right? So all of a sudden you have to just change the way you think about it. Another thing is I know Fullbay allows you to put min-maxes in, right? But how do you calculate that? How do you take into account for seasonality? How do you take into account safety stock, supplier lead time? You have to have a system in behind that to be able to input the right information. Because as long as you give the Fullbay system the correct information, it’ll do its job. And it’ll do it very, very well. So that part is something where, again, I think sometimes people have this misconception, like, how hard could it be? I’m buying a part and I’m selling it to somebody. How hard could it be? It’s a lot more complicated than you might realize.
John Whittet
People make careers out of this. You get into really heavy-duty logistics and you start moving enough parts on a regular basis that, you know, the difference between a couple cents here and there, you know, am I selling a whatever it is. I’m gonna find an oil filter for 32 bucks or 32.50. What’s 50 cents? That’s two quarters. Who cares? You start selling 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 units like that, it adds up really, really quickly. And either that can be a major boon to your bottom line, or conversely, it’s the drag on efficiency. And I’m sure you’ve seen it, Jamie. You walk into a shop, technician’s kind of hanging around, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing, John? What are you doing today? Oh, I’m waiting on a part. He’s going to be here in 15 minutes. I’m hanging out. I’m going to take a break. That’s, the clock’s ticking. That’s a bay that’s full. That’s work that you’re not getting done because you’re sitting around waiting for a shop for 15 minutes. Times 5 techs, times five days a week, times 52 weeks a year. Oh, we’re starting to talk about real money in real time.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and the other side of that coin is when, see, it’s interesting. I kind of have a very visual thought process. So when I think about things, I kind of see it in pictures. And when I go into a parts room or a warehouse, I don’t see inventory. I see stacks of cash. And one of the things that people don’t realize is how quickly the increase in inventory, if you’re not managing that correctly, can erode cash flow. and can disrupt cash flow at just the wrong time, right? You’ve got to pay the supplier, but you’re not getting paid from your customer for another 15 days. And all of a sudden, to your point, it’s not just a handful of parts anymore. You might have a warehouse with a million plus parts in it, dollars in it, right? That’s a lot of cash just sitting there and you want turns. So the way that you have to approach this is so different than when you’re traditionally just running a repair shop. And don’t get me wrong, I am by no means minimizing the complexity of running a repair shop. It is a complex business. So I think the people who get into the parts and service business, especially if they start in service, they’ve already started with a complex business and they understand how to run a complex business. So really, once they learn the basic principles, they put those systems in place, they have a powerful tool like Fullbay, they can be very successful in this, but it does take that time and effort to get your business to that point.
John Whittet
And I think you made a great point, Jamie, which is you got to understand your business. What are your mins and maxes? At what point do you order another stack? How long is that going to get here? How long before you go through that? That may change by the types of work that you’re doing, by the time of the year, for instance. We’ve got shops up in Michigan or the Great White North, and the amount of work that they’re doing when there’s 4 feet of snow on the ground is a lot different than what they’re doing in July or August. And so understanding the pulse of your business across parts and making sure that you’re looking, and not only looking once, but looking on a regular basis to say, how fast am I going through some of these things? And finding that balance between, it’s stacks of cash sitting on the shelf that I’m not spending on, advertising or technician development or a new piece of equipment or chasing more business. And then conversely, hey, the shelf is empty and my guys are sitting around waiting for the parts runner to get back. And so you’re hitting a very fine line in maximizing your cash flow. And that becomes a really regular pulse on business management that a lot of the good techs or rather good shops are doing every single day.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah. We talked about this, but I want to take a minute to just go a little deeper. So you talked about bin locations and with parts, especially as you start to develop this parts business into a true parts distribution business, you’ve got a warehouse, you’ve got a retail space in the front of the store usually. But then if you have the service component, you also have parts in the service shop being, you know, staged to be installed. And then you might have it on mobile trucks. So bin locations and knowing where your inventory is such an important part of parts management. Could you just walk us through again exactly how people can accomplish that within the Fullbay system?
John Whittet
So it’s a bunch of different locations. And so we start with almost the warehouse view. And that warehouse could be anything. It could be the literal warehouse, your distribution center. It could be your service center. It could be your front desk. It could be your mobile truck.
Jamie Irvine
It could be a container in the backyard.
John Whittet
Or the container in the backyard or the box that’s kicking around. It’s been Lord knows where for the last six months. And then again, you continue to go down. That’s on shelf number five. That’s in bin number three. And so that allows you to say, hey, I’ve got five oil filters in this exact location, and I’ve got three more over here. That gives me 7 all day. Those kind of roll ups to be able to understand not only what you have on stock or not, because you’re going to balance things around. Wait a second, I need to move three more parts over to my mobile truck. I don’t need to buy more. I’ve got some in the warehouse. That’s fine. I just need to move them around. Or, hey, listen, across the entire enterprise, we’re now running a little bit low. We’re below where we want to be in terms of the min. It’s time to rework.
Jamie Irvine
Okay, so once I’ve established my bin locations, you mentioned cycle counting, so I can then quickly print out cycle count sheets from my Fullbay system. And I’m assuming that’s going to follow the best practice of not giving me the quantity, just giving me the bid location of the part number. I go check it and verify. Is that correct? So you’re following all of those best practices?
John Whittet
And it’s amazing how easy that is to skip. I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing, Jamie. It’s like, oh, you know, I did a count a month ago. And you go, well, actually, wait a second, that was July and now it’s November. It was a little more than a month ago. And so getting into that business process habit of cycle counting, again, driving some of this business rigor around how you’re managing your parts and your inventory, it’s as much a technology problem as it is a business problem. And it’s amazing how many times shops think they know how many stacks of cash you’re sitting on their shelf. You go in and actually do that count, and it is radically different. And so getting in that kind of habit, really actively managing your parts room or your distribution warehouse, however big you are, is incredibly important.
Jamie Irvine
Okay, so you mentioned e-commerce, which made me think of integration. So how does Fullbay integrate with other platforms that someone might need to use to run their parts and service distribution and service center?
John Whittet
So integration is huge, not only in parts, but in all of heavy-duty service management. And so today, we are connecting through suppliers through Fullbay Marketplace. And so you’ve got live pricing, availability, cross-references, so you can order those parts faster and smarter. And so that helps you a lot when, again, when it’s time to reorder, how do you automate that versus having to pick up the phone, call the local NAPA or Advance, see what they might have in stock, send a guy up there. This can be something you start to automate. And then on the revenue side, building out that broader connectivity to e-commerce, retail POS tools. We’ve got a lot of our shops that have the credit card terminals such that they’re connecting payment when somebody walks in. Those are some of the items that you’re no longer selling on credit. You’re getting cashflow in real time. And again, all that flows through full-based inventory and accounting automatically, so that keeps you out of the out of the Excel spreadsheet trying to track what you have and where and when and how. And so this is an area that we’re absolutely continuing to expand in as well. And our vision is really to let shops sell wherever their customers want to buy. You want to buy over the counter? Great. You want to buy online? Wonderful. You want to buy it as part of your service job? We can do that too. And to be able to say yes, meeting a customer where they are is incredibly important to drive revenue without adding some of that operational chaos that often goes along with it.
Jamie Irvine
Where are we going with AI?
John Whittet
Everywhere is probably the short answer. And so it’s amazing what AI is doing with shops, even just a basic ChatGPT instance. We’ve seen our shops doing some really, really interesting things there. It can help you with some of that data analysis, understand where your min and maxes might be, understanding what your seasonality might be. And so we’re continuing to build that into really every part of the Fullbay platform. We just released a feature that’ll rewrite some of your tech notes in real time. It’ll do voice-based transcription so you guys don’t have to sit there with a keyboard typing things in. It’ll translate. You’ve got a tech that speaks Spanish or Russian or French or your language of choice, your customer speaks English, boom, that’s all automatic as well. And so I think we’re just going to continue to see a lot of really interesting AI-based features, that aren’t AI for AI’s sake, but they’re AI in a way that’s going to drive a ton of transformation in how shops are operating and hopefully get shop owners, technicians, service managers back to what they’re really good at.
Jamie Irvine
That’s a lot. We talked about a lot of things in a short period of time. When a business is going through one of these transformations and they’re diversifying, as we said, they oftentimes are short, when it comes to maybe people with enough experience, there may be some training. There also may be just the fact that I’ve been on the Fullbay system for a while, but I’ve not used these features before. So how does Fullbay support and provide people the ability to like actually talk to a real person and get help or put in service requests to better understand how to use a feature? Like how does Fullbay support its users in that way?
John Whittet
So we’re all education first. And so we’re continuing to think about not only how you get the answer as quickly as possible, and that may be picking up the phone and calling us. We’ve got folks on the phone 12 hours a day, five days a week. That may be getting you an answer with our help center. We’re deploying AI internally. But if you’ve got a simple question, I can give you an answer in about 15 seconds. You don’t have to pick up the phone. Same way we were just talking about a minute ago, we at Fullbay want to meet our customers where they are as well and then start to give some of the advice that we’re talking about on this podcast of what’s next. If we see a shop that has a little bit of inventory, we can start to offer some of those proactive insights. Hey, it looks like you actually have a business here that you might not even know about. There might be some efficiency opportunities where I can point out proactively, it looks like your mins are a little bit too high. Looks like you’ve got some seasonality you might not know about. We want to elevate both what’s happening in your shop, how you might compare to shops like yours, giving you opportunities to connect with other shops that are thinking about or have already tackled some of these things that you might be considering as you grow your business. So we really are seeking to not be the end-all, be-all, but form a community of heavy-duty repair shops around how shops are adopting and embracing this evolution. Because the heavy-duty repair world is evolving incredibly fast, AI and otherwise. And so those successful shops are those that see themselves not only as repair centers, but full stack service businesses. And again, that’s a really big transformation.
Jamie Irvine
So we’ve talked about a lot of things in a short period of time. If you want people to remember just one thing about today’s conversation, what’s that one thing?
John Whittet
It really is how fast we’re growing and what a future of a repair shop actually looks like. And it’s to a degree a guy in a bay, but it also is that full-service business, selling parts, offering mobile services, building long-term customer partnerships, digging into really unique niches that are being underserved, actively managing financial bottom line, and building the techs on top of that as well. We made a comment earlier on, hey, good techs are hard to find, and they are. And so keep the ones you have, grow the ones you have, give them the opportunity to learn some of these new skills. Put them to work to not only do what they’re doing every single day, but help growing your business. And so your techs, your team, Fullbay, your peers around you, the technology that’s coming online right now, all of that exists to power this transformation. And so we’re certainly here helping shops grow, diversify, stay profitable. We want to maintain that craftsmanship and that integrity that, at the bottom line, define this industry.
Jamie Irvine
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and we’ve been speaking with John Whittet, Chief Customer Officer at Fullbay. To learn more about Fullbay, visit fullbay.com. Links are in the show notes. John, thank you so much for being on The Heavy Duty Parts Report.
John Whittet
Thanks, Jamie. Appreciate it.
Jamie Irvine
And thank you for listening and or watching The Heavy Duty Parts Report. As always, I want to encourage you to be heavy duty.
