How parts managers can control the future of equipment uptime

Every day when he came to work, Dave Reed started out already behind the eight ball.

As the parts inventory specialist for Ajax Paving Industries of Florida, it’s his responsibility to make sure the parts for their 750 heavy equipment assets are at the machines on time and within budget for necessary repairs and maintenance.

But each morning, he was greeted by a stack of parts requests piled up from the day before.

Many of them lacked essential information before he could send the requests on to their vendors, so he’d need to track down the technicians for more details. If they weren’t available, he was forced to wait for them to return his calls or texts.

Meanwhile, his email and phone would be blowing up with teammates seeking order status updates, leading him to turn around and call their vendors to ask the same thing.

“We calculated that I was receiving emails and phone calls [that added up to] about four hours of my day,” Reed says.

It felt like he was constantly trying to put out fires, when a new one would ignite, leaving their parts ordering process trapped in a vicious cycle where they could never get ahead.

With their entire repair and maintenance workflows – and therefore, their fleet’s uptime – riding on him and whether he could get his job done efficiently, it seemed less like he was calling the shots and more like a tsunami wave of chaos was simply carrying him through his day.

He didn’t even have the time to dream of operating another way.

Besides, everything did get done eventually … despite the delays, long lead times, miscommunications, and wrong parts orders.

This is just how parts ordering always was. Reed and their fleet team didn’t know anything different.

Making it easier to manage the workload

The supply chain backlog that lasted for months in the wake of the pandemic created an initial catalyst for change.

As his vendors’ lead time to fulfill parts orders grew, Reed needed an alternative way to find what they were looking for. He started using the Sourcing Plan of Gearflow’s Parts Hub, a web-based system where he could send a single request to the largest curated supplier network in North America and get quotes back from multiple vendors to compare price and availability.

The results impressed him.

“Whenever our vendors told us there was something backordered and I would go through [the Gearflow network] and all of a sudden you have it … that really convinced me from the beginning,” Reed says.

He began to wonder how else he could create efficiencies for their parts ordering process – and he didn’t have to look far.

Gearflow Parts Hub Pro was designed for heavy civil fleet teams like his, to make it easier to manage the entire parts ordering process with their vendors.

With Gearflow Parts Hub Pro, fleet teams can:

• Centralize all their parts ordering and communications in one place to track everything in real time
• Eliminate tedious, repetitive manual data entry essential to processing requests
• Identify proactive ways to optimize parts inventory management and control costs, with automatic insights before things go off course

“Now the mechanics send the requests through the Gearflow app,” Reed says. 

He gets immediately notified and can check their internal inventory before pushing the request to their vendors with one click – no more juggling dozens of browser tabs and web portals. Each request is tied to a machine with a serial number, reducing time-consuming back and forth with vendors and improving order accuracy. 

Vendors are alerted to a new request by email or text, and they do not need a Gearflow account to process the request through the platform. All they need to do is click on the request link, which takes them to a simple web form to add price and availability and send a quote back.

Parts Hub Pro’s built-in instant messaging also allows direct communication among Reed’s teammates, their vendors, and Gearflow’s team of live parts experts, cutting phone calls in half and creating a historical record for every request and order. All parties are notified each step of the way.

Hear how Dave at Ajax slashed his back-and-forth calls to Ajax’s vendors and is making more strategic and proactive decisions to benefit the fleet.

From stressed to a strategic uptime advocate

Before Gearflow Parts Hub Pro, Ajax’s parts request fulfillment used to average 7 days. Now, it’s down to about one.

Response time from vendors, from the moment a technician sends a request until a vendor delivers a quote back, is happening in minutes, instead of hours or days.

This has allowed Reed to hang up his firefighter hat and become a strategic leader for Ajax’s fleet. He’s proactively managing parts inventory and costs and even starting some of his days with in-person visits to his vendors to strengthen relationships. Backordered parts are a thing of the past.

“I can concentrate more on quoting my vendors and the accuracy of the parts coming in,” Reed says. “It’s very simple software. I wish I had it earlier in my career.”

Most importantly, he is now armed with insights to offer valuable recommendations to his fleet manager and technician team to have a positive impact on Ajax’s bottom line.

In their first four months running all their parts ordering through Gearflow Parts Pro, Ajax has:

• Eliminated an aggregated 10 months of lead time for parts orders across their fleet
• Saved an average of 3 days of lead time per machine
• Reduced the cost of each PO by an average of 12%

It’s hard to imagine that previously his days looked totally different.

“I just want it set in stone that this is going to be part of our process from here on out,” Reed says. “I’m looking forward to seeing what Gearflow has to offer for us in the future.”