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Advantages and disadvantages

The safety data sheet data extraction types

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safety data sheet / sicherheitsdatenblatt
iLixe48/Envato

Nowadays, the supplier of a chemical is obliged to provide his customers with a safety data sheet. This is usually done digitally in the form of a PDF document. In principle, the supplier can also print out the SDS and send it to the customer with the goods or by mail.

We classify the recipients into three categories. Of course, this is not a universally valid classification, but our personal finding.

Type 1: Everything is organized in paper form and filed in (dusty) binders.

The advantage of this method is clearly that the amount of effort required for handling it is minimal. All you have to do is press the printer button in the PDF reader, pick up the paper from the printer, punch it and file it. It will take you about 5 minutes to do this at an average printer distance from the workplace of 20 meters. This is done mainly in companies where the IT environment is quite rigid and somewhat frozen.

The main disadvantage of this method is that these documents are not searchable and cannot be easily accessed in case of a question or problem. Imagine a warehouse incident. A chemical spills and employees have no idea how to proceed. Reaching for a mop is not always appropriate.

Our opinion: Method not recommended except for a small number of SDSs. We are happy to show companies ways to better and more easily manage their SDSs.

Type 2: SDSs are stored digitally in folders.

The advantage of this method is that it is the easiest to perform compared to the other methods. In most cases, the digitally delivered SDSs are stored on a server directory with a specific naming convention. In some cases, even certain groups of people within the company have reading rights to these directories and can search the directories for the appropriate SDSs as needed.

This approach can definitely address the biggest drawback of the previous method: The SDSs are now digitally accessible.. BUT not searchable. The key combination CTRL+F can help a bit. But this must first be done for the countless SDSs. Another disadvantage of this method is that the data from the SDSs is not available digitally. In the case of creating an operating instruction or risk assessment, the information must be laboriously collected from the documents. Apart from that, the method, like method 1, also does not provide an overview of the chemicals present in the company: So the CTRL+F must be used again and again.

Our opinion: Method can be recommended to a limited extent. If companies deal with a small number of chemicals, this method may be sufficient. Many of our customers use our package for small enterprises in this context and benefit from a non-invasive way to digitize and organize their SDSs.

Type 3: SDSs are recorded manually and stored digitally. The silver bullet?

The advantage of this method is that all relevant data from the SDS is digitized. This means that operating instructions, risk assessments or digital hazardous substance registers can be created from them. Many systems also offer the option of automated notification of suppliers as soon as the SDSs become outdated. This makes life extremely easy for the responsible professionals.

The main disadvantage of this method is that it is the most cumbersome compared to the other methods. This is because the data from the SDSs must be entered manually. Depending on the amount of data, it takes about 20 minutes (this time can sometimes be more or less, depending on the need) to manually enter an SDS. Especially when a large number of SDSs need to be captured, this activity becomes quite exhaustive. We will write an article on error statistics at a later point.

Our assessment: Almost the silver bullet, if … Companies should definitely go in this direction. Well, we can take away the fear of the effort involved in collecting the data. Combined with SdbHub, such solutions can be the modern and forward-looking way to sustainably improve the handling of chemicals in the company for the employees. That would be the silver bullet!

Getting your silver bullet with SdbHub

When we started with SdbHub, our goal was to develop a solution that would minimize the effort required to manually enter SDSs.

That was in 2016.

Today, we are able to perform the read out of SDSs very accurately, so that the effort of manual data acquisition from SDSs is on average 80% more efficient (after the implementation also up to 100%). We have turned the original 20 minutes per SDS into a maximum of 4 minutes. Our goal is to push the whole process to less than 120 seconds. A challenge, but one that will make life easier for many. Another support is provided by our many integration partners, who already have great EHS software with great graphical user interfaces, which we supply with data from SDSs.

Our promise: SdbHub will be continuously developed, improved and will include more automation steps in the future. After all, we want you to continue to read in data with no worries in the future and to further reduce the interaction time during data entry.