How Parts Identification Can Make or Break Your Repair Shop
Discussing the complexities of parts identification in the trucking industry and its impact on your business.
Episode 291: Getting trucks back on the road can be a tough process at the best of times. Especially when you can’t get the right parts, the first time. Meet Joe Steward, General Manager of Bets Truck Parts and Service, in this weeks episode, he shares his view on a few topics including parts identification in all its forms.
Going back in time for a minute, we reminisce about the old days when catalogs were the source for identifying parts. We explore how the explosion of tech-driven solutions has added many layers of complexity, particularly with vehicles that have gone through several iterations. The ripple effect of identifying the wrong part can be disastrous from the supplier to the end-customer. Joe shares stories from the front line, where his team has battled time to get a truck back into operation.
Finally, we finish our discussion by exploring the current landscape of parts identification in the trucking industry. Joe talks about the challenges and successes his team has faced when it comes to finding the right parts, and how advancements in technology have ironically both simplified and complicated the process. Get ready to uncover how the parts identification can make or break a business!
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Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine:
You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people. Parts identification is a challenge if you are on the independent service channel side of the business. If you work in the OEM and the dealership environment, as long as you’ve got a VIN, parts identification is pretty straightforward. But if you work on the dealer side or if you’re on the aftermarket side and you step outside of that where your all makes, it’s a completely different world. Today we’re going to talk about the challenges associated with parts identification, the costs associated when we get it wrong and proactive steps we can take that will improve the way that we identify parts and make sure that our customers are getting the right part the first time. To help me with this, I’m very excited to have Joe Steward, the general manager of Bett’s Truck Parts and Service with me. Now, Joe has been a general manager in the heavy-duty truck transportation industry for over 20 years. He has always been interested in understanding how things work and has dedicated his career to doing just that in all aspects from parts and service to people and process. Joe, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. Glad to have you here.
Joe Steward:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited to engage.
Jamie Irvine:
Alright, well let’s talk about parts identification. If you’re on the independent side of the business, it is a challenge. You and I look like we’re kind coming from roughly the same age group. So let’s talk a little bit about the way things were when we were first entering the business and learning the business. Joe, when you first got into the business, what was the way that people went about identifying parts, especially on that aftermarket side of the business?
Joe Steward:
Oh man. Well, we have the table full of catalogs. Hopefully we had a customer who was competent enough or had the technical ability to tear down whatever project they were working on, or at least be able to limp their product or their vehicle in so that we could climb underneath it and identify whatever part they was broken and needed to be replaced.
Jamie Irvine:
So let me ask you something. Were you a fan of the catalogs on a bookcase or did you have those big metal bins with the big rings that you could put all the catalogs together on your desktop?
Joe Steward:
I got lost in that because typically I like to see the spine of it.
Jamie Irvine:
Okay, so you were a bookcase guy.
Joe Steward:
Totally, yeah. So then I could kind of order them by alphabetical or however your brain works, man.
Jamie Irvine:
So I had it the other way. I used the big metal contraption that you put all your catalogs in and I had just tabs and I had it all laid out. Not an alphabetical, but I had it laid out by product type. So I had air, electrical, suspension, wheel end, stuff like that. So there’s some differences, but that’s the way it was done right.
Joe Steward:
Right. Yeah, I mean the way your brain works, and we also had some microfiche and all kinds of other sources of technical breakdowns and data aside from being able to, a lot of these guys that we have in the aftermarket are able to take a phone call and ask, what are you working on? And in these trucks, they’re all 100% custom built, right? It’s not like an automotive industry where everything kind of has the same stuff in it. You could have different transmissions or gear sets or braking systems and all kinds of stuff on these vehicles. And so it’s interesting to see and hear the questions that have to be asked and answered to narrow down exactly what it is we’re looking for.
Jamie Irvine:
That’s a good point, Joe. What I remember distinctly about, especially the way I was trained, is that you had to ask the right questions. The first question, is this on a truck or is this on a trailer? But you had to know intuitively how to ask those correct questions because if you didn’t, you could easily be going down the wrong road.
Joe Steward:
Not only that, but you could be frustrating your customer on the automotive side, going into a parts shop and asking for a set of wiper blades and then having the counter person ask you the year, make and model of your vehicle and whether or not it was an automatic or a manual, and whether or not it was four wheel drive or two wheel drive for a set of wiper blades. You’re like, come on, man. That’s the type of thing that in our industry, your reputation is on the line and your ability to hold your own and have that dialogue with your customers in a way that’s productive and makes them want to come back on top of, like we alluded to earlier, finding the right part the first time and the way that you handle those situations is imperative. Especially in the aftermarket, it’s a little bit more scrappy. It’s harder to get that business.
Jamie Irvine:
It is. I remember when they first started showing up and they would have catalogs on a disc, like a CD rom that you could put in your computer, but those things were outdated just like the printed catalogs. You were just always anxious for the newest catalog information possible. I think you also had to learn how to read a catalog, which I think was a good thing. It taught you kind of how to think through identifying the part. And I think that’s something we lost when everything went online. When things did move to online, one of the things that I noticed right away is the reliability of that information really deteriorated rather quickly. If I had a Bendix catalog, even if it was an older one, I was pretty sure that when I got it figured out I had the right part. But a Google search doesn’t necessarily point you in the right direction.
Joe Steward:
No, you have to be really careful. So some of the stuff that you run into is suggested or something along those lines, and very quickly you can think that you’re looking at the part that you need and you’ve taken a left-hand turn somewhere and ended up in some other aspect of the vehicle or for a product that’s related, but not necessarily the part that you’re looking for as well.
Jamie Irvine:
And one of the things I did a lot in air systems, so if you have these valves and they’ve got different crack pressures, they look identical, they visually, they look the same, same number of ports, they’re all three eights on the bottom or they’re all half inch. They have the same number of inlet and outlet. It’s all identical, but there’s a different crack pressure and there’s no way to visually know that. So if you don’t have the right set of data in front of you, you don’t have the information in front of you that’s accurate from the manufacturer, you could easily give someone the wrong part. And that’s just one example. I mean, you get into electronics, it’s like that probably exponentially worse than on the air side. Now you’ve always worked on the service side as well as parts. Whereas for me, I’ve pretty much predominantly just been in parts. How has it been on the service side? Just thinking back to those years past, what unique challenges were there if you also had a service shop?
Joe Steward:
I would say that preparing for a job before it came in and then finding out the stuff that you prepared with is wrong because of a conversation with a customer maybe went the wrong way between the service manager and the customer, or there’s a slight misunderstanding on one thing or another on exactly what the root cause of the failure or the issue was prior to the truck showing up for its appointment and then showing up and being almost afraid is probably the wrong word, but very hesitant to take it apart without having what’s needed to replace what needs to be replaced in stock. And so then doing the hurry up and rush and run around, you’re actually shopping your competitors for parts that you need to fix a truck that’s in your shop. So it’s a little bit humbling on that front as well as just wanting to make sure that the customer has the best experience possible in your shop and wants to come back. And so hustling through that, that is when the truck shows up, it’s like kind of hunting that whale or that elephant or whatever. And then once you get it, it’s like now the work starts. Now I got to figure out how to make this happen in a way that’s sufficient and makes everybody happy.
Jamie Irvine:
And now I’ve seen you kind of move into the more recent times, and we’ve kind of seen an explosion of people trying to solve this parts identification issue from a technology perspective. And we’ve seen different apps roll out, different software platforms, integrations with telematics, all kinds of things. And it’s almost at this point, there’s a bit of overload there, but there still seems to be a core issue, which is it’s very difficult to narrow down all the variations, so even if you were to be able to get the data from the OEM, let’s say you got the Bendix data from Bendix and it was accurate, that doesn’t necessarily always correlate to the Kenworth truck sitting in front of you versus the Freightliner and the variation in 2016 on one option or another. So parts identification despite all of the technological advances still seems to be a problem.
Joe Steward:
Well, there’s a whole another layer that you didn’t mention, and that is how many iterations of this truck have since it was produced to where it is right now, was it used as a roll off and now it’s a tractor and then it was a dump truck? How many lives has this truck lived and what did they do, the ownership throughout, what have they done? And to change the suspension for the requirements for that particular application and all those types of things. And so it’s definitely complex. I mean, you have to almost have the vehicle or the part in front of you to make sure that you’re giving ’em the right thing the first time every time.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And when I was selling in northern Alberta, we were very, very heavy oil and gas. But in 2016, the oil prices, the commodity prices collapsed here in Canada, and it was real tough times for about two years there. And so we had all kinds of oil fleets that were in oil and gas and they were rigging their trucks to go logging. And then three years later that the cycle and logs goes and oil and gas comes back, so then they rig again. And you’re absolutely right, every time they rig that truck for a specific vocation, and that’s predominantly driven by the fact that these are work vehicles, these are assets that have to be out in the field making money, otherwise why do you even have them? Right? So no, that’s definitely something that adds to the complexity of it.
Joe Steward:
It’s tricky, especially in the aftermarket when you don’t know what that truck has on it because of its age. I mean, especially in California, it’s a little bit easier because typically the year range of the trucks has to be pretty tight in order to fit carb standards and all that. And we don’t have to get into that today, but we’re lucky enough to operate also in Oregon and Arizona. So we get a lot of that flavor in those states where those trucks have gone through different iterations of different lives that those trucks have lived. And it definitely makes it fun. And I think the customers gain a lot of respect for a counter person or a service manager, whoever it is that’s trying to help them identify something that didn’t necessarily come on that truck when it was built, and wouldn’t matter if you had a VIN number or not, because it’s going to take an expert to visual, get the visual identification, and then do some digging to make sure that you get the right thing.
Jamie Irvine:
And also, I think of how vehicles have changed so much over the last 25 years. When I entered into the business, what was being produced there was long consistent runs. So you would have the same kind of setup, suspension wise and engine platform and everything on a specific make and model. And maybe that run would last for several years. And so it was almost identical parts as long as it was within that age range, you were pretty sure that the part you were looking for and it was all mechanical, so there’s a lot less to remember. Then all of a sudden you have so much more electronics. Now we have all of these ECMs that are running different things. You’ve got all these fault codes, you’ve got all this complexity to the technology, and that’s really changed the game on parts identification as well.
Joe Steward:
I agree. We’ve been in an aftermarket and we don’t necessarily do, in my business, it’s mostly suspension and wheel end type work that we’re in right now. And I got to tell you, we’re pushing our fleet, our technicians and our service managers to plug into every truck that comes in the shop just like a dealership does, pull codes prior to and after appointment, and just even on the ABS and traction control systems just to show that we’re paying attention to everything that comes through the door and trying to show the customer everything that’s going on with their truck while it’s in our care.
Jamie Irvine:
Well, the game has changed. We’re going to talk more about this after our break. We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor, find it parts. We’ll be right back. This episode of The Heavy Duty Parts report is brought to you by Find It Parts your ultimate destination for heavy-duty truck and trailer parts. Discover a vast range of parts at finditparts.com. Don’t spend hours a day looking for parts instead, visit find it parts.com and get them right away. Parts availability and quality have a big influence on fleets and owner operators’ total cost of operation, if they can’t find a part, it means more downtime. If they install a low quality part and it fails, it means even more costs like tow bills, hotels, meals for the driver and lost revenue. That’s why we recommend Sampa. They manufacture a wide range of advanced parts for commercial vehicles.
Their website has an intelligent product search engine and broad coverage of suspension, steering and fifth wheel components. Expect more. Expect Sampa. Visit sampa.com today. Joe, before the break, we were talking about kind of the way that things have gone with parts identification, and we went back in time, back in the days of catalogs and mechanical equipment to today. I’d like to talk a little bit about the impact all of this has on everybody in the supply chain. So if you don’t get the right part, if you misidentify the part, you send it out to the customer directly or you try to install it on their vehicle and you find out, oh, it’s the wrong part, what does that do for that end user customer? What’s the cost associated with that?
Joe Steward:
Well, I mean, we use uptime in our industry every day. It’s the most important thing in the industry is making sure that these assets are rolling and making sure that we’re delivering all the products and services around the nation or around the world that are required for everyday life. And so doing everything we can to make sure that that stuff is constantly moving.
I would just say that there are a lot of cases where we’re up against the situation, and I mentioned it earlier about having to go to some of your competition to try and pick up a part to hustle and get this truck back on the road because these customers, our customers have customers and their customers have customers, and it creates a whole chain of disappointment and frustration and delay and pricing changes because of it. And it causes all kinds of logistical nightmares for, most times, I would say we don’t really fully understand the end impact at the location that you’re trying to service the customer at.
Jamie Irvine:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think about, let’s say a fleet, right? And they’ve got a truck and it misses a deadline that could jeopardize the relationship with their customer that’s using them and their service. You think of an owner operator, their families are reliant on this truck and their mom or dad to work and make money. So that’s food on the table. I tell this story quite a lot, but I remember, I’ll never forget the one guy whose wife called me and said, if you hadn’t helped me with that transmission problem, I don’t know what we would’ve done for groceries next week. And it was just such a moving moment for me because it made me realize how important it is to get this right. The cost isn’t just for the end user customer though too, that the distributor and the supplier all obviously are impacted when the wrong part is shipped. So walk us through a little bit of what that feels like from your perspective. If the supplier sends you the wrong part, what does that do to your business?
Joe Steward:
Yeah, we’re all positioning ourselves for realistic and sustainable profitability. And I think that when these types of things happen, it puts all that in jeopardy. As a supplier to my customer, I’m battling to keep the price in line, and even though maybe I made the mistake or maybe the supplier made the mistake and shipped me the wrong part, regardless of where that mistake lies, I’m kind of trying to position myself to not lose on it and my customer’s positioning themselves to not lose on it. And same with the supplier and beyond. And so that’s where relationships come in really. And I think that we need to make sure that we’re responsible with one another and how we navigate those things respectfully and just try to work it out. I mean, we’ve done crazy things, man. We’ve put trucks on airplane seats and in Uber cars and all kinds of different methods to try and make things happen for a customer made hotshot runs to meet up with another that we own because it’s the only one in the west coast or something crazy where we’re trying to each drive four hours and meet in the middle and bounce back out. It’s hectic. And for us to do all of that and have the customer still miss a deadline, man, I mean, it’s a tough market. It’s a tough industry.
Jamie Irvine:
And you’re right, you mentioned the importance of relationships and that relationship with your customer. They don’t expect perfection, but when something goes wrong, they want to see you take action. I remember times where there was a lot of, I’ll get you the part and we’ll figure it out after. It’s like the downtime was going to be far more than any freight cost or any delivery charge or anything. So just the get the customer, the part, whatever you have to do and then figure it out on the backend. And I think that from the distributor’s perspective, profit is not easy to come by. It’s not like we’re just making double or triple digit profit on every sale. The reality is sometimes margins are slim and then something not showing up on time or having to go to those extra lengths, we’re losing money, and that’s a real cost to the distributor.
And sometimes they have to just eat that and it’s not even their fault. I can’t tell you how many times I had to just eat something because the supplier missed the shipping deadline, and now it’s like, it doesn’t matter because my customer needs to be taken care of, so I’m going to get the job done and we’ll figure it out on the backend. So yeah, there’s a real cost there. And I think from the supplier too, if they don’t execute well over a period of time, that pushes the distributor to reconsider who they buy the product from. And so I think up and down the supply chain, the stakes are really high and all for identifying the part correctly.
Joe Steward:
Well, when we’re selling to, you call it retail or business to business either way, or we’re selling to a customer that sometimes pays cash or sometimes has net terms. And I think that when we’re trying to sell at a reasonable market price, you have to buy in volume to do that. And when these one-offs come at you, they’re not cheap. They’re not cheap. And it causes potential strain on relationships in both directions.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So what is Betts doing to invest in the technology you’re using, training? What steps is your company taking to make sure that all of their parts professionals have the best tools and are trained well so that they are able to identify the parts the customers need?
Joe Steward:
We’re using Motor and some of the other cataloging opportunities. A lot of the vendors these days have great cross-reference guides built into their websites.
We use those. We’ve also engaged with an online store builder for our industry who has done a great job of helping us with our online store, providing cross-reference information and things like that that we can use to help customers out when maybe we don’t have X brand, but we have Y and can help them through those types of methods. And really it’s just with the generational changes that we’ve seen and the decrease in the workforce volume in our industry, we don’t have that knowledge that we used to have. The guy or a gal that could answer the phone and give you the part number off the top of their head without looking at the catalog no longer, they’re dwindling, right? They’re harder and harder to come by. And so we’re having to rely more and more on technology and online catalogs and sourcing methods that are different than they used to be because the workforce simply doesn’t have the experience that they used to have, the depth of experience.
And so we’re trying to cover up the lack of experience with technology, and it’s in some cases successful and helps expedite certain things. But it definitely comes with it some set of challenges because you’ve got to make sure that they’re paying attention to the details. I mean, you kind of mentioned earlier you do a Google search or something for a part and it it could send you to a related part or something that’s very, very similar. It looks exactly the same, and maybe even the background image is the same. So you got to read the fine print that says image used, not necessarily whatever that verbiage is or the terminology they use. You have to really pay attention to what you’re doing because again, looping back into the rest of the conversation that we’ve had so far is just you find yourself offering the wrong part very quickly, very easily.
Jamie Irvine:
And the training that is required. Now, I think back to when I was first being trained, I remember I went and I said, Hey, what is this? And it was actually a MV three valve, and the person who was my mentor who’s training me, he said, I can tell you the part number or I can show you how to figure out what that part is. And he goes, it’s your choice. And it was a test. It was a test to see. I was like an 18 year old kid. It’s like, well, what kind of an employee do we have here?
Joe Steward:
You’re going to ask me every time or am I going to teach you?
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, exactly. So I said, show me how to look it up. And he goes, right answer, correct answer. So once I learned how to identify that suddenly on those particular group of air valves, I was asking him a lot less questions. That same philosophy still stands today. It’s just what we use is different. So it’s like, let me show you how to go to this website. Let me show you how to use this supplier’s tool. Let me show you how to use this technology we’ve invested in. Let me show you how to figure it out for yourself so that you can be independent moving forward. But I still feel for the young people in the industry because the complexity of the equipment is so much greater than it was 25 years ago. So their learning curve is much more, let’s say it’s a steeper learning curve maybe than what we experienced. We just had to learn how to read catalogs and kind of memorize the most common parts for them. For them it’s a different world.
Joe Steward:
Definitely. And I think you kind of brought it up there, leveraging the vendors that make these parts to help with that training as well, and using their websites and coming in and showing. There’s a lot of times our vendors will come in and ask, how’s it going? Do you have everything you need? And they get the yeah, yeah, right. But a good vendor rep will start asking tougher questions like, well, do you know how to look this up? Or Have you logged into our website and have you used this cross-reference tool? Or have you had to search for this or that type of part? And really get over someone’s shoulder and be involved in helping them realize that they have a tool that they could learn from rather than kind of having that, oh no, I got it. I’ll figure it out mentality. So leaning on those vendor partners, supplier partners is really important and is another great aspect to the training portfolio or options.
Jamie Irvine:
I agree with you completely. Tell me a story about a Betts customer who really relied on Betts to get the right part, the right time, and how did it all turn out? So how does everything you guys do come together? Tell us one of those stories.
Joe Steward:
Yeah. Well, like I mentioned earlier, we’ve gone out of our way and taken great lengths to make something happen for a customer at our own expense, just to make sure that they had a good experience in a situation where somebody made a phone call, had to drive actually to this location here in Portland from Tri-Cities in Washington. It’s a several hour track and made their way down and got here, and what we had wasn’t what they needed. And while they were here, we had to make the phone calls they watched, they observed our counter staff hustling to try and source the part that they did need, and then the branch manager drove over across town to pick one up and bring it over and take care of ’em, and situations like that. I think that people in our industry, they’re very familiar with that type of service you have to provide in order to keep that customer to have any chance at having somewhat of a decent experience for the customer in that type of situation.
Other situations where a customer, like I said earlier, where we are prepping for a service job, hopefully ahead of time, so when the truck shows up, we have what’s needed. We can disassemble and reassemble in a much quicker fashion, but we prepped with the wrong order or the wrong parts, maybe having used the VIN number and finding out. Another thing that we mentioned earlier is these trucks go through, in some cases, several iterations of use. And so it doesn’t have what it did have when it was made, and we made the mistake of trying to rely on the VIN number and finding out when it shows up that we’ve got the wrong stuff and having to go, again, either starting close and working your way out in geographic distance from your pinpoint location to try and find that part, hustle out and get it and bring it back to the shop so that we can keep going and get the customer out with the right stuff.
Jamie Irvine:
One thing I know is when you do it right, people do appreciate it, but when something goes wrong and then you hustle and you fix it, oftentimes they never forget that hustle, right? So that is part of the game. It’s part of what’s necessary to be successful. You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts report. My name is Jamie Irvine, and it’s been my pleasure to talk to Joe Steward, general manager of Bett’s Truck Parts and Service. If you’d like to learn more about Bett’s Truck Parts and Service, go to bettstruckparts.com. Links are in the show notes. Joe, thank you so much for being on The Heavy Duty Parts Report, walking down memory lane with me of what it used to be like for parts identification and giving us a realistic view of what it’s like today in parts and service. Thank you again. I really appreciate it.
Joe Steward:
Thank you, Jamie. Appreciate the opportunity.
