Innovation key to survival for local business. (Special Report: Elliot Lake/North Shore).

Timberock Innovations Ltd. intends to set the gold standard with an emerging interactive software program for creating electronic parts books.

The Elliot Lake machine shop plans on releasing their so-dubbed GoldPage in mid-March, allowing users to build and update their own parts or service manuals, or convert printed manuals to an electronic format.

Timberock co-owner Yves Nelson says one of the beauties of their easy-to-install, easy-to-use software, which has been in the development stage for a year and a half, is that it allows manufacturers to put their parts books on the Internet for use on Web sites.

"What makes it unique is the ablility to use the parts book interactively, and be able to customize it with their own notes," says Nelson, 49 , a former Denison mine worker, who co-founded Timberock in 1986 with younger brother, Frank Nelson, 40.

Though specializing in the manufacture and repair of mining equipment such as rock drills and loading systems, as well as servicing the forestry industry, the company has demonstrated the flexibility to change with the times.

When Elliot Lake's uranium mines closed in the early 1990s their business clientele numbers plummeted by about 90 per cent, shrinking the company down from 15 people to five.

As their company name implies, Yves says they survived by having being innovative and evolving into "something totally different," with a new software division employing four programmers.

The 25-employee machine shop had been dabbling for years in the designing of electronic parts books for their mining equipment feed systems.

Though the feedback from customers was good, creating the manuals was an intensive and time-consuming process since programmers worked on the images and spent hours editing information.

"It took about three to four weeks to do one...but the end result was good," Nelson says.

"Because of the good reviews we thought there might be a market here."

With click-and-drag simplicity, users can tack on extra pages to organize their work into individual sub-assembly parts sections, listing prices, weight, parts numbers and any special maintenance and repair notes.

Parts images can be scanned from print manuals, discs and drawing files for conversion into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for Web publishing. And GoldPage supports most major formats including CAD applications.

The company is putting together a three-person sales team in anticipation of taking their product on the road this year on the mining, forestry and general industry trade show circuit, then more widely to the institutional market.

"If we can do a good job hopefully this can be the standard," says Nelson.