Practical Playbook: Simple Ways to Speed Parts to the Bay and Stretch Battery Life

I have read many articles on parts management. They always seem to include inventory cycles, LIFO vs. FIFO, obsolescence, shelf organization, Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards (VMRS) applications, min-max levels and yada, yada, yada. It is likely you have too. Parts inventory management, the subject of all of the above, is definitely a science, and likely the one with the most potential for mismanagement in a fleet shop, public or private. But you know this already.

This article covers none of that. Instead, presuming most of you have a parts department of some kind, let me offer some easily adopted suggestions from my own experience that use the daily activities of your parts staff to reinforce technician productivity and speed vehicle throughput. Most of these are about speed. The last one is about money. After all, once all of the above is covered, isn’t excellent customer service to your technicians the goal of your parts operation? So let’s get right to it.

First, number each of your service bays so the number can be seen from outside. Use large signs, or paint the bay number on the exterior of the building above each overhead door. Your sign shop or facilities department may be able to help.

Next, give your technicians instant remote voice access to the parts room, whether through inexpensive handheld radios, your fleet management information system (FMIS) or the internal phone system. Technicians then “call” the parts room with their parts and supply requests instead of showing up at the window. That keeps them in their bays turning wrenches and eliminates the unproductive stroll to the parts room every time a part, a pair of gloves or a can of brake cleaner is needed.

This next step is the key one. When an inventoried item (a part, gloves, an aerosol can) is pulled from stock, a parts person delivers it directly to the technician and places it wherever the technician needs it, such as on the workbench. Even a one-person parts room can do this, using a wheeled cart or hand truck when the items are heavy. Large shops that do this typically label plastic bins with technicians’ names for easy identification.

Most fleets rely on vendors for a large share of the parts they need, so parts personnel order those parts only when a technician needs them. Most parts suppliers deliver directly to your shop’s parts room, right? Instead, include instructions with each order stating to which numbered bay the vendor must deliver.

Some shops include the technician’s name too. On delivery, the requesting technician can inspect the part to make sure it is what they need and sign the paperwork confirming receipt. The driver then presents that paperwork to the parts room for processing and entry on the repair order, with delivery to the technician already confirmed. The same instructions work for parcel carriers such as UPS and FedEx.

This eliminates the stockpile of vendor-delivered parts that builds up in many parts rooms, either because the technicians are too busy to retrieve them or, as happens in many places, because nobody tells the technician in a timely manner that the parts have arrived. I have been in parts rooms where ordered parts languished for more than a week.

If a core is involved, the delivery driver can retrieve it and load it directly from the bay, so neither your technician nor your parts staff has to lug cores back and forth. Cores from starters and turbochargers can be very heavy. Why make your people carry them around? Again, the driver and the technician can note on the paperwork that the core was retrieved.

Handling vendor parts this way gets technicians the parts they need faster and should get repairs finished sooner and more efficiently. You can appreciate the value of keeping a technician who earns $25 an hour or more from burning clock time walking across the shop. You can also appreciate the value added when a stock part is delivered directly to the technician by parts personnel who are likely paid less than your technicians.

This is a simple yet efficient reversal of what happens in most shops.

One more job for the parts room: batteries

Everything so far has been about moving parts out of the parts room faster. My last suggestion runs the other direction. It concerns something that comes back to the parts room every day and, in most shops, goes straight to the scrap pile: batteries.

Most parts personnel pay little attention to them. Most technicians servicing a multi-battery system (ambulances, fire apparatus, heavy trucks and heavy equipment) replace all four batteries when only one or two have failed, in order to maintain maximum voltage integrity.

So before every removed battery is presumed dead, designate a section of the secured parts area as a recharge area to confirm which ones truly are. Build multi-position wooden shelves with a trickle-charge position for each removed battery and charge each one for 24 hours. Then run a load test on each battery to assess its true condition. Parts personnel can do this, and they are easily trained for the task. When a battery fails the test, set it aside for disposal. Fully recharged batteries that pass the load test go back into inventory at zero value. Reuse those first, at no cost to the customer (they have already been charged out once), before pulling new batteries from stock.

This practice will lower your battery usage and cost.

I am an old-school guy who prefers a carbon-pile load test on a VAT-40. However, many shops have replaced the VAT-40 with handheld impedance testers. Regardless of how the test is performed, the objective is to avoid discarding perfectly good batteries, a practice that is unfortunately still very common in our industry. Believe it or not, your own battery supplier can help you set this up and keep your battery costs low. They too will support your decision not to discard perfectly good batteries.

The introduction of 48-volt systems, with four 12-volt batteries wired in series, is a prime OEM consideration for meeting the higher power demands of 2027 emissions system architectures. The integrity of these systems will be critical to ensuring the emissions controls and the vehicle’s heavy overall electrical demand operate as designed. Battery health will become even more important than it is today. Smart fleets have incorporated, or soon will, battery health testing at each preventive maintenance inspection, 48-volt systems or not. Either way, the parts room is where a lot of technician time and a good bit of money get decided. Run it like it matters.