Texts, emails, and calls.
That is how 90% of parts requests come through to dealers and parts suppliers.
They come by the hundreds each day, leaving parts sales reps constantly bouncing between their customers, trying to gather all the information necessary to send back quotes while reprioritizing responses based on significance and urgency.
Historically, processing a parts request is often not as simple as it sounds. It’s a time-consuming endeavor filled with questions going back and forth. Why? Because up to 70% of the parts requests that vendors receive lack a part number,¹ and 80% of the time, the machine’s serial number is not provided.²
For years, this is just the way it was — meaning it could take hours or even days from the moment a vendor receives a parts request until a quote is sent. For Ajax Paving Industries of Florida, the average turnaround across their 45+ vendors took one to two business days.
That’s because it all depends on how busy the parts desk is and the thoroughness of the initial request, says Jake Nieminen, an inside parts sales rep for over 20 years at The Peterbilt Store in Fort Myers, Florida, one of Ajax’s vendors.
Nieminen says he typically juggles up to 50 customer requests a day — some of them with up to 20 line items each. In the past, when Ajax’s Fort Myers location needed something, one of the shop technicians would text him.
“Most of the requests weren’t anything really detailed,” Nieminen says.
That would kick off a string of texts and emails to clarify exactly what was needed and for what machine, he says. Because he switches tasks between customers so much in addition to servicing walk-ins, Nieminen says he prefers to communicate via text or email to keep a written record to follow.
“For me to answer the phone sometimes is a nightmare,” he says, since it’s likely he’ll have several interruptions during the course of a single call.
Like most parts sales reps, Nieminen did the best he could to manage the daily onslaught and meet his customers’ needs as quickly as possible.
Yet some days still felt like a losing battle in this race against time to get equipment back up and running.
In 2023, however, Ajax found a new way forward.
The Venice-based paving contractor decided to automate their parts ordering process with Gearflow Parts Hub Pro. With Parts Hub Pro, the fleet team can consolidate their ordering across their mixed fleet, centralize all parts-related communication, and get real-time insights to control costs and improve fleet reliability.
Technicians now submit requests on the Parts Hub Pro mobile app to Ajax’s parts inventory specialist, who reviews the request on the web version of the software and checks it against their internal inventory before sending it on to their vendors. Since Ajax’s entire fleet is uploaded to the Parts Hub Pro platform, requests can be tied to a specific machine and all its information.
Technicians can also attach photos related to the request and any questions can be answered via in-app messaging, creating a historical log with each request and order.
When Ajax sends a parts request through Gearflow, he’s instantly alerted via email or text, similar to before. Vendors do not need a Gearflow account to start receiving and processing requests.
What has changed is now Nieminen gets everything he needs right from the start to processing Ajax’s request quickly, including the machine serial number to accurately verify fitment.
“It works wonderfully because they’ve already put in a lot of information when I get the request,” he says. “If I need any information, I can ask with the instant messaging for that particular request, and I can get pictures back.”
After he reviews the request, all he needs to do is enter price and availability into the web form to send a quote back to Ajax. This allows him to respond and quote more efficiently, so he can move on to other customer’s needs.
“Otherwise, what happens is I get an email, and I get busy,” he says. “Then I get 20 other emails and guess what? The email that I got an hour ago is now pushed down out of my screen, and I might not remember it’s there.”
When a request from Ajax comes in via Gearflow, he knows he can process that request before he even has a chance to get distracted.
“Gearflow is very easy, which is nice,” he says. “I have thoroughly enjoyed working in the system so far.”
He also likes that he can prioritize Ajax’s requests based on whether a machine is marked as down.
“That lets me know to stop what I’m doing and knock this one out real quick so they can get moving again,” he says.
Recently, Ajax had a dump trailer down due to a leaking brake valve body, and Nieminen was able to send a quote back within six minutes from receiving the initial request.
Once he submits a quote through Gearflow, Ajax is able to quickly review and approve it, automatically sending the purchase order back to the vendor to process the order.
Watch this short video to see how vendors use Gearflow to quickly process their customer requests
When Rich Milam, the parts counter rep at Lakeland Ford, another one of Ajax’s vendors, found out that the paving contractor would be managing their parts ordering through a new software, he was initially skeptical.
Milam, who’s been in his position for 13 years, handles about 100 customer requests via email a day, and he was used to responding to Ajax’s requests that way.
Then he saw how easy it is to send a quote by entering price and availability into the Gearflow form and how handy it is to have all the request info in one place, including pictures that help illustrate exactly what Ajax is looking for.
That was not something Milam used to receive with Ajax’s requests, and he says the photos instantly provide clarity without him having to ask questions back to make sure the right part is ordered.
“They're not waiting on an email from me, and I'm not wondering what they're looking for if they attach the pictures in their request,” he says.
Milam likes the simplicity and transparency that using Gearflow’s software provides, making it faster and easier for him to serve Ajax.
When vendors receive a request through Gearflow, they can claim their free Sales Hub account, which allows parts sales reps to move away from primarily managing that customer’s requests and quotes through email, text, and calls by replacing it with one easy-to-use platform.
“Everything's right there and organized,” he says. “I can just find the order number and pull it right up, instead of having to sift through the hundreds of emails that I get every day.”
Vendors can also choose to manage all their customers, whether or not they have a Gearflow account, by upgrading to Sales Hub Pro.
Overall, Nieminen says he thinks Gearflow allows the Ajax fleet team to operate more efficiently, stay on top of PMs, and instantly know the status of every order.
“Gearflow is a lot more advantageous for them,” he says. “It makes everything more organized and easier to track, and there’s probably fewer people going and ordering things on a whim. I think being able to go back to reference things is a good thing for them.”
Besides helping Ajax to run their fleet better, Nieminen says Gearflow has improved his ability to service them well. Nieminen says other teams should consider processing their parts requests through Gearflow, because both customers and vendors can work together more smoothly.
“It would benefit everybody,” he says. “It would benefit the customer, because they are able to track what they're buying more easily. And then what the system allows us as the vendor to do is make it possible to process requests as quickly as we can.”
What used to take hours or days is now down to minutes, resulting in happy fleet teams and happy vendors: A true win-win for both sides of the parts process.
¹According to Gearflow data
²According to a major OEM dealer