What is MSDS Management anyway?

Since we are in the business of making MSDS management easy for people, we often get asked in various ways what is required anyways.  Most companies start off by organizing their MSDSs in a yellow three ring binder and call it good.  This works for awhile too.  If you are in a smaller organization with a single small location with few staff and few chemicals this may indeed be all you need.

However its funny how such a small thing can become out of hand so quickly.  Even if you have a small quantity of substances on the premise that require the safety data sheets it can still become an unwieldy chore.  Some things to consider:

How do you know you have the latest version of a document?
If you have multiple versions of the same MSDS document, what do you do with the old ones?  OSHA regulations require you to keep them but you don’t want people to be confused with the wrong document.
How quickly can you check to see if you do indeed have a safety data sheet for any particular substance?

Once organizations talk about multiple locations, or even multiple buildings at the same location things become even more complex.  Many times environmental and health safety engineers that should be working on value added activities for their companies are forced into tedious time consuming clerical tasks to manage multiple paper binders are various physical locations to ensure that everything stays in sync.  Especially if companies are routinely audited for quality management systems it seems like checking the consistency of binders seems to be an ever growing target of auditors.

What we provide is:

  • Simple system
  • We make sure you have the latest version
  • We make sure that the documents can be access anywhere, anytime
  • We make sure that all historical MSDS records are archived appropriately
  • We make creating the various reports easy
  • We make organizing your MSDSs the way you want them to be organized easy and quick
  • We make sure you have copies of your entire database
  • We make sure that you have a toll free number to call, and that the system will be there so you don’t need to call
  • We make creating secondary labeling quick and easy

What we don’t do is:

  • Provide software that has to be configured and installed
  • Require any form of corporate IT intervention (unless they want to, and then we are glad to work with them)
  • Hold your data hostage

People laugh when we tell them that we make MSDS management fun!  As such a statement seems ludicrous, but while the management may never be fun, figuring out what you will be able to do now that you don’t have to handle this aspect of your job anymore just might make it fun after all.