How do you make thousands of pieces of safety data readily available at twenty different locations in three states and keep them all current?
Handling chemical products can be tricky business. Everyone handling them has to know what precautions to take. And if an accident happens, knowing how to respond can be a life-or-death matter.
For a major northeast utility company, managing safety data for toxic materials was a very real problem. Mollins Technologies, Inc., (MTiC) an Authorized Dickens Dealer, helped solve it-with imaging technology.
Steve Mollins, MTiC president, talks about the problem: "Large utilities have hundreds of employees in daily contact with thousands of possibly hazardous materials. The vendors of the materials all publish safety data. The information has to be available quickly. And it has to be up-to-date."
Existing systems were slow, error-prone
The challenge was managing more than 20,000 pages of material safety data sheets (MSDSs) published by many different vendors.
Copies of MSDSs were filed at a central site and at every site that used the product. Manual retrieval was slow, indexing was a problem. MSDSs were lost, misfiled or simply not returned.
Looking at alternatives
Retrieving and faxing paper copies from a central library would be slow, and image quality on the receiving end might not always be acceptable. Hand-keying masses of data into central server files would be time-consuming and error-prone. High probable error rates made optical character recognition unacceptable.
MTiC recommended an imaging solution---running on their clients existing hardware---with software and support from Dickens.
Imaging software with database control
The Mollins solution combines imaging software with a database application. Users can query a LAN-based server for a product name, chemical name, manufacturer or other characteristics. The database identifies the data sheets and the imaging software sends the images to the user's PC for display or printing.
The benefits? There are several. All users have instant access to all MSDSs. An MSDS can't be misfiled, lost or unavailable because it's in use. Users can see if a material they need is in use at any other site. The scanning process actually improves the print readability of some data sheets. The process is fast, error-free and the system cost keeps the benefits economical.
Mollins used Wang imaging software. The Wang software spans a range of systems so there is plenty of headroom for future growth.
Was it simple? Not exactly.
Mollins says, "We needed to have the database application control the imaging software. That's beyond the 'plug and play' level of interaction. it required careful planning and development."
The system is in its early stages. Growth plans call for a network of forty or more PCs at up to twenty sites. Other plans include adding fax capabilities to the application. In case of an accident, each station will be able to fax original-quality images to medical facilities in minutes.
What does it take to add imaging to an existing system? It takes specialized know-how, software and support.
The specialized imaging expertise came from MTiC's years of experience with imaging systems. the software and support came from Dickens.
"Dickens support was responsive," says Mollins. "At one point we were having an implementation problem. The system worked on the development PC, but not on others. When the problem proved difficult, Dickens technical support recreated the environment completely,-down to the identical version numbers of all local and network software. That was a key step in attributing the problem to the operating environment on the failing PCs."
"Dickens helped me accommodate my client," Mollins says. "They were there when I needed them, and they were thorough-far beyond the call of duty."
Steve Mollins can be contacted a MTiC (508) 867-8303, fax (530) 618-6876, email spm@mollins.net .