Who is the client?
Our client is a leading provider of end-to-end chemical compliance through cloud based SDS management.
Their platform is offering a web-based solution in managing chemical inventories and risks. With a whopping database of more than 500,000 SDS documents, this platform provides environmental, health & safety (EHS) professionals with the support, technology, and know-how to make informed decisions about the chemicals in their organization. Using their service, businesses are able to unlock the data within the safety data sheets (SDSs) and obtain structured information in order to manage thousands of chemicals, safely and sustainably.
The challenge
First, let’s give you a bit of a background.
In 2012, the U.S. officially adopted the Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of classification of chemicals and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). An agency of the department of the United States Department of Labor had asked all chemical manufacturers, distributors and importers, to reclassify chemicals and update all SDSs and labels to the new GHS format by June 2015.
With this change in mind and the potential business opportunity opening up, our customer had rolled out a new version of the SaaS platform in 2015. Their data needs simply skyrocketed, as the majority of the chemical manufacturers, distributors and importers had updated there SDSs to the new GHS format by the end of 2015.
There were about 350,000 SDS to be acquired from various chemical manufactures and a vast amount of data to be extracted and entered to the SaaS platform.
In order to follow through on their commitment to the long-standing customers the company needed to implement a scalable data process that ensured data accuracy.
Now, the company had two options. Either to perform this huge task inhouse, or outsource it. Doing it in-house meant the involvement of a lot of key people who could be better utilized and focussed on more critical business functions and growth. Hence the decision to outsource was made, and the company reached out to us.
What we did
With an urgent need to update the database with the latest versions of GHS compliant safety data sheets, we came onboard to source and enter data from approximately 350,000 SDSs over a period of 18 months.
Our operations team broke the task at hand on a monthly basis, setting as a target 20,000 documents to be handled per month.
Once the training and production plan had been laid down we created 2 separate teams, one for sourcing/acquiring the SDS documents and one for the data entry set up.
Naturally, the operations team worked closely with the customer to put in place a training plan, define a document sourcing strategy, and implement the relevant KPIs.