The Honda Accord of Shop Management…Or, How Fullbay Helped an Equipment Rental Shop

We recently sat down with Robert Lee, the service manager at Rental King in Odessa, Texas. The company rents out aerial lift equipment that is primarily used in oil fields, which, as you can imagine, is rough on the machines.

“We can’t fix them as fast as they break them,” said Robert, who joined Rental King in 2018. Some of these oil guys, he added, could “break an anvil with a feather.”  So maintenance and repairs are necessary. The internal shop has eight employees; most of them work in-shop, but two are usually out on the road, traveling to the oil fields and making repairs onsite. 

Within a year of joining Rental King, Robert recognized some inefficiencies and decided, in his words, to go software shopping. The shop gave another program a try, but its overall inflexibility was disastrous for his department. “I went rogue and bought my own software,” he said. That software ended up being Fullbay, and the rest is history.

Robert acknowledged that he hasn’t yet dug into everything Fullbay can do. Still, he’s pleased with the implementation so far, and he’s looking forward to exploring it more when he has time. 

In the meantime, here’s how Fullbay has helped them out: 

TRACKING STUFF IS WAY EASIER

Fullbay provides answers to a lot of questions shops often have but aren’t able to answer on the fly. Things like: 

• How much money is getting spent on a particular unit? 
• How much time? 
• What are the techs working on moment to moment? 

Robert can now pull up Fullbay and see, within seconds, who’s working on what and how much they’ve sunk into a particular piece of equipment. “It’s just made the data more accessible to me per unit,” he said. “I can track back what work’s been done to it.”

Fullbay has also helped them track inventory. Rental King keeps a small inventory on-site, and the app’s tools have helped them get on top of their parts room. “As we add [parts] to work orders, we try to keep updating that inventory,” he said. 

MORE FLEXIBILITY IN THE SHOP

Fullbay’s features have a little something for everyone. Techs can get started on jobs faster, and Robert has been building out worldwide service order action items (SOAI) tailored to their specific machines. These services are categorized as internal charges — “Nobody’s really at fault,” he explained; “stuff breaks” — and include some preventive maintenance (PMs), warranty work, and customer damage. He hopes to continue building out PMs so the shop can start tackling them before they are due or overdue. 

He’s also a fan of Fullbay’s ability to make changes to past work orders if necessary. “If one of my guys makes a mistake,” he said, “I can re-open a work order” to make the correction. 

SPEEDY ONBOARDING

Yes, there’s a learning curve for Fullbay, but Rental King was able to implement it fairly quickly, especially compared to the “monumental amounts of time and energy” they’d spent on the prior software. Fullbay’s onboarding rep helped him figure out how to get the app working the way he wanted it to. 

“The staff’s been great,” he added. “Being able to call somebody and get responses to stuff very quickly has probably been the biggest help.”

ONWARD AND UPWARD

When we spoke, Rental King was on the verge of moving into a much larger facility. Once they’re in, Robert plans to find out what else Fullbay can do for the shop. He’s been very pleased with how the software has performed thus far, even going so far as to wonder if it would do even better things for a bigger shop that had more bandwidth and manpower to work with — more of a “Cadillac” experience as he described it.

For now, this smaller internal shop is having a good time with Fullbay. “It’s been great for us,” he said. “It’s like a Honda Accord. It’s reliable and looks pretty decent.”  

Hey, we’ll take it.