PHOENIX—According to Scott Gordon, VP of product at Fullbay, building a shop management platform for the heavy-duty repair sector is “like ordering pizza for thousands of my closest friends,” because Fullbay users range from the “lone wolf mobile repair customer” to large enterprises with several locations.
They all have different wants and needs, and sometimes their preferences contradict one another, so “it's kind of impossible to order one pizza that everybody in the room is going to want,” he told attendees at the 2025 Diesel Connect conference in Gila River Resort & Casino - Wild Horse Pass, in Chandler, Arizona.
The solution is to find a balance when improving the software that addresses all the feedback Fullbay receives, which Gordon said was in the thousands. These range from boosting performance to adding more analytics.
“We're investing heavily in not only building a faster, more scalable product, but also designing something that's more intuitive and streamlined in terms of a user experience,” Gordon said. What that really means is by the end of the year, Fullbay will provide a more modern and balanced platform, thanks to two new additions and two enhancements to existing features.
These include:
- A new integration with Mitchell 1’s ProDemand and TruckSeries platforms to access repair information, diagnostic data, and estimating tools
- The launch of a new tool and brand called Fullbay AI to simplify the documentation process during repairs
- Fullbay Payments enhancements that tackle refund management, security, dispute resolution, and scalability
- Upgrades to streamline user experience when accessing FleetCross, Motor’s parts, service and repair information platform
Mitchell 1 integration
“One of the many learnings for me, being in your shops, is how valuable a great parts manager can be, and how frustrating and expensive it can be when mistakes are made with part ordering,” Gordon explained. To assist with this, Fullbay’s new integration with Mitchell 1 allows users to access ProDemand and TruckSeries data through the Fullbay platform.
This integration is designed to help Fullbay “simplify parts data entry and management” for shops, Gordon said, particularly in better handling their cores, managing shipping and handling fees, decreasing their manual parts entry on service orders, and improving their parts search. To do so, the integration provides standardized labor estimates, diagnostics data, and interactive wiring diagrams to shops through the Fullbay platform.
Although the integration is still in beta, according to Gordon, the company expects the integration to “go live to all of [its] customers by the end of the summer.”
To access the integration, shop owners or managers must have subscriptions to ProDemand and/or TruckSeries, and Fullbay Connect Elite. If a user meets those requirements, “you'll be able to use your credentials and log into Fullbay to access either light duty, or heavy duty, or both, depending on what subscriptions you have in Mitchell 1,” said Ryan Denny, product manager for Fullbay.
Once logged in, users can access the ProDemand labor estimator in Fullbay’s Service Order page, allowing them to drill down into specific vehicles and component parts and add them to service orders and estimates, along with their rate and estimated labor hours.
This feature will be available to users through an additional subscription later in 2025.
Motor integration enhancement
The shop management developer also enhanced its Motor integration to create better user experience, particularly with the FleetCross database. By doing this, this will help fleets quickly and answer the questions ‘How long is this repair going to take?’ and ‘How much is this repair going to cost?’ from their customers, Gordon stated.
“Having access to industry leading information about labor time service guides can help build accurate, reliable estimates,” Gordon explained.
That’s why Fullbay and Motor have worked to make their integration’s search feature faster and made it easier to include Motor’s labor time and service guide information on an order for Classes 1-3 and 4-8 vehicles.
Users can also search for action items and parts for specific vehicles to add to an estimate even if they don’t have the VIN number, instead searching with a truck’s make, model, and year number. Motor and Fullbay also added parts cross referencing with the same flexible search features, so techs can search for parts using a vehicle VIN or a part number.
Fullbay Payments
Fullbay also enhanced its Fullbay Payments program in several ways, particularly focusing on refund management, security, dispute resolution, and scalability.
“The number one rule of business is ‘Always get the money,’” Gordon asserted. “If you don't get paid, it gets really hard to stay in business, and we want to help you get paid faster, easier, more reliably.”
To do this, Fullbay Payments now offers automated payment fees for credit card transactions and shows line-item discounts on invoices. Fullbay also allows users to accept and manage payments within Fullbay, including online invoicing, instant payments, reconciliation, quick refunds, and even dispute management.
“It's smoother, it's faster, it's an easier way to handle payments, and it's fully built into your workflow,” Gordon continued.
Fullbay Payments is included with every Fullbay subscription.
Fullbay AI
Finally, Fullbay has released its first AI product and brand, Fullbay AI. The program will assist technicians in creating repair documentation by making it easier to enter data with talk-to-text entry, and it can clean up techs’ handwritten entries by clarifying verbiage to make notes and service orders more presentable for customers.
“I’ve heard from… probably 20 or 30 people that technicians don’t write the greatest notes to customers,” Gordon said to laughter from the crowd. “So, we wanted to get this in your hands as soon as we could.”
Additionally, Fullbay AI is meant to eventually help out with reporting, too, and eventually help shops assess their businesses overall, Gordon added.
“In addition to running reports, you'll also be able to simply ask Fullbay AI for information, such as ‘Who was the best tech this week?’ or ‘What is my current min-max inventory in my Detroit shop?’” Gordon said.
Fullbay AI will be releasing its data entry feature later this year, and its reporting and assessment capabilities will be available at a future date.
About the Author
Alex Keenan
Alex Keenan is an Associate Editor for Fleet Maintenance magazine. She has written on a variety of topics for the past several years and recently joined the transportation industry, reviewing content covering technician challenges and breaking industry news. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.