Sustainability & Risk / Hazardous Materials / Manage Material Inventory

Enter SDSs and Assign Products to your Site's Locations

In accordance with global regulations, manufacturers of potentially hazardous products must provide an SDS with the product upon initial shipment. For example, suppose you are a research lab and are going to start working with a new chemical in your experiments and studies. When the chemical provider sends the initial shipment of the chemical, they will provide an SDS outlining its properties, storage requirements, safe handling requirements, and so forth. Using Archibus, a safety manager can store the SDS  in the Archibus document management system, or can enter a link to the document on the manufacturer's web site, so that the information can be distributed to employees and emergency response personnel, and be available in the case of accidents.

To enter SDSs into the Archibus system and associate these SDSs with building locations, you use the Manage Material Inventory process.

Procedure

The basic process for managing SDSs is:

  1. For each product that you receive on site, enter the item's SDS information into the Archibus system. A safety manager enters the SDS data required for retrieving SDS and providing summary analytics, and can also store the SDS itself in the Archibus document management system , or can provide a link to the document on the manufacturer's web site. See Understanding the Scope of the Archibus SDS System.
  2. You will want to know the locations of the substances within the building. You typically do this in two ways:
  • As you receive new products, you determine the areas where you store, use, and dispose of these items.
  • Periodically survey your facility to be sure that all products found on site have, indeed, been entered into the system. Archibus offers the Hazardous Materials mobile app so that you can perform this survey using a mobile device and upload the data to the Archibus SDS system.
  1. For each substance found at your site, assign its SDS to the specific locations in the building where this substance is found using these methods:
  1. As the manufacturer issues updates to the SDS, update the Archibus system with these changes.

Note: When entering the SDS information, the safety manager or other personnel will choose from lists of validating data. If you find that the lists do not contain the values that you need to complete the SDS information, consult your business process owner or safety manager. These users can enter the values using the Background Data - Hazmat process . In a few cases, you can create values as needed using the Add New feature.