You are sitting on the platform (your chair, I presume) at the first stop of our tour right here. Maintenance consultant and supersite: Springfield Resources (http://www.maintrainer.com)
This is the author's site that has most of the sites in his books (that still exist) as hyperlinks. A supersite is one that has over 10 quality outgoing links to other useful sites on the Internet. If you find a site you want to visit just click on it. To get back to where you were just hit the bacdk button on your browser.The link or resource section is organized by topic.
Maintenance supersite: Vibration Institute of Canada (http://www.vibrate.net)
This site has about 50 links to other sites, newsgroups, and associations. Maintenance professionals will be very interested in many of the organizations offered. Associations are generally good sources for leads to interesting sites in a particular industry.
Maintenance magazine: Plant Services (http://www.plantservices.com)
The maintenance magazines are also excellent supersites. Add to that an archive of articles, chat forums, advertisements and you have a potent useful blend. Plant Services magazine has a service where they send you E-mail when the site has changed with the table of contents of the new issue.
Auction Site: Ebay http://www.Ebay.com No tour of the Internet is complete until you visit Ebay. It is the leading auction site and has branches in countries world wide. Anything you can imagine (if it's legal) can be bought or sold on Ebay. This is one answer to the maintenance manager's nightmare; being able to find obsolete parts in a hurry. It is also an answer to another nightmare: how to get rid of obsolete parts. Go ahead try it. Put something into the search box. Try something simple first like "Punch Press". Any for sale today?
General Pump (http://www.generalpump.com.)
General Pump of Mendota Heights, Minnesota has developed a service on the Internet they call "Datalink." This site is up 24 hours a day, year around. It features downloadable engineering drawings, bills of materials for their pumps, new product information, discussion groups, training capabilities, and the ability to place electronic orders. Look closely because this is the future of the Internet.
Omega (http://www.omega.com)
The most user friendly company in the transducer field is Omega. In fact, they are my favorite transducer company. Their colorful and useful catalogs have graced my shelf almost two decades. I imagine that the printing costs for the catalog are quite high each year. When people start using the Web site they never want to go back to catalogs again. Companies with large, expensive catalogs like Omega or AMP can lower costs, speed dissemination of new information and improve customer services at the same time.
Government site of interest to maintenance: Example: Department of Energy http://www.energy.gov . The government is the biggest user of the Internet. It has thousands of homepages for all agencies, departments and bureaus. The DOE has resources of use to the maintenance field in the area of energy conservation, research, and grants for energy reduction projects.
Industrial Distributor: W.W. Grainger http://www.grainger.com
The 3 1/2" Grainger catalog has also been a mainstay reference book for what ever I needed since I entered the manufacturing world. Even as a consultant I still order things from it. W. W. Grainger is one of the largest industrial distributors in the world. They have had a proactive approach toward technology. The company's CD-ROM has been available for years. It included a proprietary interface to allow access to their computer system. It is no surprise that Grainger has a pretty complete web site. Imagine the possibility of direct computer to computer linkage through the Internet with Grainger. Using these linkages the acquisition cost of maintenance parts and service items has plummeted.
New and used machinery sales Used Machine Directory http://www.surplusrecord.com//index.html:
You can buy almost anything on the Internet. This site is a directory of other used machinery sites. Enter a search term and it will list the sites that have that item for sale. The used machinery companies have staked out a section of the web for their offerings. These vendor pages show typical layouts with master equipment lists, prices, equipment ages and, if you are lucky a photograph.
Search engine: Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com)
Yahoo was first. In a typical Internet story some college age people wrote the program and created the search site. Their idea was almost an instant success. Yahoo is one of the most popular search sites. Yahoo uses human knowledge engineers to create the indexes. Advertising banner revenue funds yahoo and most of the other search engines.
Search engine: Google (http://www.Google.com) Yahoo might have been first but Google is the biggest. It is so popular that "to Google" is a verb that means to look something up on the Google search engine. Try something like SAUERBRATEN! Only 148,000 web sites that mention it.
Job Hunting at http://www.Monster.com Monster is the largest and most developed job hunting site. But in specialized markets or in particular locations other Job Hunting sites might perform better. Of course to find them ask friends and search Google or Yahoo.
