The global management of chemicals represents one of the most important responsibilities of many manufacturers. Proper execution of environmental, health, and safety activities is complex and involves not only health and safety professionals, but also production, distribution, purchasing and sales--virtually anyone in the organization who sources, handles or sells hazardous materials. This is particularly true in managing Material Safety Data Sheets, the second-most printed documents in the world after invoices.
Even as companies implement enterprise resource planning systems, they are finding that regulatory compliance functionality is rudimentary at best and usually non-existent.
With more manufacturers going global and more countries establishing regulatory compliance requirements, it is clear that better management of Material Safety Data Sheet authoring and distribution is critical to avoid product refusals, seizures and entry denials, not to mention fines and potential worker or consumer liability. Often overlooked are the potential impacts on schedule attainment, utilization, customer fill rates and turns. In short, global management of Material Safety Data Sheets is already a must for risk management and operational efficiency. It is rapidly becoming an issue of competitiveness.
How do companies make sure they are complying with and providing the necessary information and paperwork for sourcing, producing, storing and transporting hazardous materials? Many health and safety departments traditionally rely on basic word processing or desktop publishing software packages, or even low-end database packages to produce and manage Material Safety Data Sheets and labels. For a production environment with a small or static set of products, this works well. The same holds true if you produce a moderate number of products that are sold domestically, or if your product formulations are fairly simple. Authoring new documents or updating old ones are occasional tasks, and the potential impact on production, distribution and compliance risk is relatively low.
Table 1: Costs for three approaches to MDSD compliance (available in full paper)
Manufacturers that do not fit these profiles need more sophisticated solutions. For the manufacturer with hundreds or thousands of products, complex formulations and extensive international manufacturing and distribution, producing compliant documents on-demand in dozens of regulated markets and several different languages is a major challenge. Companies with these needs are either developing a sophisticated in-house system or looking at specialized regulatory compliance management software packages tailored to their needs. Even as companies implement Enterprise Resource Planning systems, they are finding that regulatory compliance functionality is rudimentary at best and usually non-existent. The questions now become, "Which is the better solution? Should I build it in-house or go outside?" Let's review the key requirements that affect the answers to these questions.
