HSI first developed the Used Equipment Network as a dial-up system in 1986. As technology progressed, we continued to make changes to keep up to date with it. UEN is the oldest and largest database of its kind. It has progressed through a number of incarnations, but has always been the first (and sometimes the only) system to provide all of its functions.

The system lists over 55,000 pieces of available used capital equipment, mostly production equipment such as metalworking machinery, electrical switchgear, and material handling equipment. The searchable database has information on over 9,000 dealers and their inventories and provides for user entry of "wanted" and "for-sale" listings that are distributed automatically to dealers specializing in the appropriate types of equipment on a daily basis.

End users can visit the site and find available equipment in a variety of ways, based on the industry-standard UED Category System. This system has been enhanced to group categories into "Specialties" and to provide correct search criteria for each category. As an example, a search for an engine lathe results in listings being returned in the correct sequence sorted first by swing and then by center distance.

Advertisers on UEN can also control listings in the companion UED-ed magazine on the site. Dealers who have the HSI TARGET system can update the UEN system automatically, but all used equipment dealers can use the site itself to maintain their inventory listings.

In addition to displaying listings on the UEN site, the system can produce inventory pages for an individual dealer's web site at no additional cost. This means that keeping inventory up to date both places can be done with a single update. Each dealer can specify the format and presentation of the inventory pages, including colors and graphics.

As with all of our sites, UEN continues to undergo modification and enhancement while still providing the base services our users and advertisers expect. UEN is programmed completely in C, so it is extremely fast and very secure. There is no fixed html involved in the site. More importantly, there is no PHP, no Perl, no Java, and nothing else that can introduce a security hole. In 25 years of operation, UEN has never been off the air for anything other than an annual planned maintenance period of a few hours and has never had its security breached. Data storage is based on B+Tree ISAM files which are also very fast.

Call us if you would like a site like UEN done for your business.