Hazardous Materials
Management
Software Details
Regulators cannot force you to manage your hazardous
materials. Sometimes hazardous materials management is the LOGICAL thing to do.
HAZMIN can allow your hazardous materials
committee to manage your hazardous materials.
To meet the requirements of safe use and training, many corporations
are going beyond the MSDS for supply of pertinent usage/safe
use data. For a variety of reasons, the MSDS provided by the
manufacturer is good information, but is not sufficient to adequately
train employees with the specific requirements of how the material
will be used at their site. Within the Material Process Control
Module, MSDSs are combined with a "REQUEST"
document, as well as, an internal "SOP"
(Standard Operating Procedure for a hazardous material).
Furthermore, some companies have recognized the value of reviewing
the introduction of a new hazardous material within a process.
Usually, this consists of reviewing the MSDS and its proposed
planned usage (a REQUEST). After evaluating the MSDS and its
planned usage, the material may then be approved for the use
planned. To insure that employees are properly trained in the
safe use of the proposed material, a training document (an SOP)
is prepared which outlines safe use and related information for
the employees. LOGICAL was perhaps the first software house dedicated
to this Hazardous Materials Management Philosophy, offering a Computerized
Material Review Process in 1986. And we have been making it better
ever since.
Even if you do not want to establish a formal approval process
approach to hazardous materials management, the database created
with the REQUEST and SOP provides management tools that are available
nowhere else. The flexibility of the hazardous materials management software allows these documents
and the review process to be customized to the exact needs of
the user.
What do ISO 14000, health and safety software & process safety management software have in common?
The answer is Hazardous Material Management. It is
no longer acceptable to just document the usage and storage of
hazardous materials and waste. ISO 14000, process safety management,
laboratory and hospital standards (to name only a few) require
a proactive approach to hazardous material management.
There is a need for a hazardous materials management system to document who, what, when,
where and why hazardous chemicals were used. Where the MSDS is
insufficient to provide adequate employee safe use and proper
disposal training, the MSDS needs to be supplemented with specific
use training.
The Material Process Control Module allows a facility or corporation
to institute as formal of a hazardous material management (review
and approval) system as is necessary to fit its needs. Review
committees can be established, approvals documented and the MSDS
augmented with Safe Operating Procedures.
The REQUEST
The who, what, when, where, and how
The REQUEST augments the MSDS with site specific data regarding
the who, what, where, when, why, how much, and how a Material
is used and disposed of within a process or facility. The REQUEST
compiles data with respect to the facility, the building, the
process location, ventilation, disposal, application methods,
material amounts, containers, and much more. The REQUEST provides
user-defined fields for corporate-specific historical usage information.
The REQUEST allows a user to pick from facility specific validations
in order to create a REQUEST. The system allows for unlimited
unique REQUESTS per MSDS. The Material Process Control Module
will archive REQUESTS (and MSDSs) into a non-current status because
of discontinued use, or updating of the documents.
LOGICAL has included key fields which need to be tracked for
comprehensive hazardous materials management, but the user may
decide to use some or all, or replace some fields with fields
that meet their own special needs. If certain usage and storage
totals are included, the software can be used to calculate Tier
II and Form R usage threshold reports.
The SOP
The in-house training document
How do you train employees within your facility on the proper
use and handling of hazardous materials as it applies to their
specific process? How do you acquaint employees of facility specific
rules and regulations regarding safe storage of a recently delivered
material? SOPs are the answer. An MSDS might state "…dispose
of according to federal, state, and local regulations…",
while an SOP will prescribe facility specific disposal information,
such as "…clean the material up with floor-dry and
place it in the green waste accumulator…". SOPs provide
specific-use training and can summarize the key parts of an MSDS,
all in the terms and everyday language of your workforce, 24
hours a day. The hazardous materials management system comes equipped with thirty "generic"
SOPs (based on material type, i.e., "Oil Based Paints"),
which can be easily modified for your distinct use. Typically,
one SOP is used for one material within a facility.
The Supreme Environmental Database Information is not available anywhere
else. Most companies acquire the Material Process Control Module
so that they can build a queriable database of hazardous material
usage, storage, and disposal which is not available anywhere
else in the corporation. The queries and cross-queries on the
data are unlimited. A cross-query may include components of specified
MSDSs found in the MSDS Management Module referenced to a list
within the Regulated Substance Database (such as the "Ozone
Depleting Substances" lists (ODSs)), with a cross-query
to the REQUESTS for the who, what, where information that one
requires.
