What to look for in a quality chemical inventory system:

You need to know what chemicals your organization has, in what quantities, where they are, who’s using them, when they expire, and all associated hazards. That’s a huge amount of information to track, organize, analyze, maintain, and locate when you need it — not to mention being able to put all this data into the required regulatory report format. 

If your chemical inventory management is the foundation for a building, then the chemical database is the soil the foundation is dug into. The database’s quality and composition dictate fundamental limits to how good your chemical inventory can be.

We all know the pain of trying to navigate a piece of software that's unintuitive and poorly laid out.

This type of software is time-intensive, draining, and uninviting to use. It’s a combination that’s particularly harmful, as your users are discouraged from regularly updating their chemical inventory.

When you can accurately track your chemical containers, all your downstream efforts become easier, more accurate, and more trustworthy.

The difficulty here is a logistical one. How do you monitor the flux of all the containers, on the range of hundreds to hundreds of thousands? This is a critical place where your chemical inventory management system should be able to do some heavy lifting.

The most important task for your chemical inventory software is providing the information necessary for regulatory reporting. Reports can easily consume an enormous amount of time and resources, given the specific formats and details needed. Having an incomplete or inaccurate report can have serious ramifications.

When you have to deal with all the minutiae of chemical inventory management —container tracking, regulatory reporting, reconciliation, inspections — it can be easy to get lost in the weeds.

Of course, you don’t do all this work for nothing. There’s a bigger picture here, and losing sight of that can lead to nitpicking, frustration, exhaustion, and dissatisfaction. Learn more about chemical safety management by clicking the button below.