4 Neat Tricks to Help Your Parts Crew Get More Out of Fullbay

Hey friends! Are you using Fullbay to its fullest extent?

Well, are you?

If you are, then congratulations! You can go get yourself a snack and go back to watching this bizarre old YouTube video featuring singing…animals of some sort. 

If you aren’t, we’ve got a treat for you. Way, way back at Diesel Connect 2025, which happened more months ago than we want to admit, our very own Ryan Magnum, aka Product Dude Extraordinaire, showed us some tricks to help parts departments get even more out of Fullbay. 

A revved-up parts department is like the secret sauce of a repair shop: add it to a dish and it just kind of brings everything together. Parts that show up when they’re needed end up on a truck much faster, and, well, you know how it goes: everyone wins. 

If you’ve tried the tricks we’re about to share…well, congratulations again! Go watch this cool video about Operation Deep Freeze.

So, want to help your parts people out? Give these tricks a try.

NEAT TRICK #1 SET UP YOUR NOTIFICATIONS 

As an owner or service manager, you can click on your employees and see all the notifications they’re set up to get. They include email and text notifications. For parts people, these notifications include:

• Service Order needs parts priced.
• Service Order parts ready to order.
• Service Order parts ready to receive.

Notifications are a big part of the Fullbay workflow — they tell you and your staff when something is ready to move along in the process. But sometimes setting up these notifications can slip through the cracks, or someone may turn them off or forget to update them. 

NEAT TRICK #2 SET UP YOUR MIN-MAX QUANTITIES

Certain parts just move fast. Others don’t. If only your parts person had a way to see what parts might be running low and even receive a smoke signal of some sort when they needed to bring in new ones…

Setting up your min-max limitations gives your parts person a real-time look at what’s in the part room and what to reordered ASAP. And on the flip side, the min-max feature also tells your parts person what not to order, because why keep bringing in parts you’re not using?

NEAT TRICK #3 THE VELOCITY REPORTS

OK, brace yourselves, because you’re getting a two-for-one deal on this particular trick. First up is the velocity report, which is basically for anything you’ve ordered and anything in your inventory that you’re moving. If you’ve purchased it, it will show up here, along with how many you’ve sold in whatever time periods you select, so you can see what’s moving quickly and what’s not. 

Then there’s the special order velocity report. It’s like the velocity report, but it’s strictly for parts that are on SOs that you don’t already carry in your inventory. This is a good report to run if you see you’re ordering a lot of, say, drum brakes and you’re going through them like candy. Maybe you should just get a pallet of them, or start stocking them regularly?

NEAT TRICK #4 THE WORK-IN-PROGRESS REPORT FOR PARTS ORDERED

If only you knew how things were going for parts that had already been committed to a job. Well…now you can! The Work-In-Progress Parts Report shows you exactly what parts are needed for the trucks being worked on. It displays the part number, part order date, the received date, and the PO number (if it has one) and vendor. It also includes fun stuff like the cost of the part and how much you’re selling it for. 

It’s a good report to look at when you want to know what your immediate costs are for the work you have going on in the shop. Because it shows you when a part arrives, you can also quickly gauge how old that part is; in Ryan’s example at Diesel Connect, he had a tech using a hose that had arrived in the shop in 2018. Do we want to be using such an old hose? Probably not. 

YOU CAN LEARN A LOT AT DIESEL CONNECT

These are but four little segments of Ryan’s much larger presentation, and that presentation was one of many geared toward helping Fullbay users get the most out of the software. There was something for everyone: the parts department and technicians and service advisors and…well, you get the idea. 

If you’re already using Fullbay and want to get more out of it (or just want to party in the desert with other gearheads!) then look into attending a future Diesel Connect to see Ryan and the rest of the crew. Or, you know, if you don’t use Fullbay and your interest has been piqued, maybe try our free demo and see what kind of cool stuff we can do for your shop!