What's the difference between low tech and high tech?
“Low tech works", joke from the early computer days
my low tech version of note taking
And if you chuckle at that, you may have been involved in technology for a day or two.
So along those lines, if you find the 848 EDI ANSI X-12 transaction set a little bit too daunting for the structured exchange of Safety Data Sheet SDS data, how about 3 simple flat text files?
That’s how we implemented the exchange of (M)aterial Safety Data Sheet structured text information from corporate to the individual plants for a Big 3 Automotive client.
There were 3 flat (text) files in what we called the “MIP” (MSDS Interface Program):
Key information there was “only one of”: Tradename, Manufacturer ID, Flash point, pH, specific gravity, DOT Hazard Class, a few other fields.
Chemical Constituents, more than one per (M)SDS
Manufacturer information.
The “only one of” was a little simplistic. Many chemical products will have more than one Product Name. pH and Specific Gravity are commonly given in ranges. But it was sufficient for the time and made building the ap easier.
Manufacturer information became more interesting as time went on, since companies were regularly acquired, renamed, and otherwise restructured.
The fact that I’m referencing Material Safety Data Sheets MSDS’s instead of Safety Data Sheets SDS’s tells you this was before OSHA implemented the UN Global Harmonization System GHS, so changes would have to be made to implement a similar program today.
And today we also have Zapier and other integration tools to make processing of the information easier.
Having the structured text interface and processing that into the Environmenal database (usually called an EMS Environmental Management SYstem these days) made it possible to run a quick logic process on the chemical “based on this information, is this chemical like something we’ve seen before?”
For Saturn, that really was a different kind of car company in a good way, especially with respect to their environmental program, this let them compress 10,000 Safety Data Sheets into 20 generic sets of Safe Use Instructions.
We’ll visit more about that process in a later post.
Future blog posts will also share some of the “edge value” lessons learned about special data use cases.
It was amazing what we discovered as a result of being able to see how the data was really received and how that changed over time (gasoline, anyone?).
Til next time…
Community Outreach: What are your plans for implementing structured receipt of SDS information? If you’ve already explored it, what have your experiences been?
