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Chemical companies are challenged to meet GHS standards, implementation deadlines, a new body of rules and regulations for the registration, labeling and tracking of materials all while geographical lines are blurred because of industry globalization.

Despite the quickly changing tides, investors and stakeholders are still expecting secure and consistent business operations across borders. Customers are demanding more focus on EHS&S through the supply chain. And you’re left wondering how you’re supposed to meet all these expectations. 

You know at the center of it all is solid and sound communicating about the chemicals through labeling and documentation. It’s the whole point of GHS. So how do you get better control over this critical element? You implement a software with legendary ease of employment and acclaimed technical support that also has chemical labeling solutions all ready to go: BarTender®

BarTender® lets you design, print, and automate the production of chemical labels which gives you centralized control and security. It’s your solution. 

DATA CENTRALIZATION & SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

BarTender® allows you to consolidate management of your system’s labeling processes and workflows which reduces redundancies and duplicative activities. Integration with your ERP or EHS system (such as, Oracle, SAP, Epicor, IBM Websphere, HighJump) allows you to generate SDS and labels from the product master data. You can do the same thing from a third-party regulatory data provider or a local spreadsheet on your hard drive.

BarTender® allows you to consolidate management of your system’s labeling processes and workflows which reduces redundancies and duplicative activities. Integration with your ERP or EHS system (such as, Oracle, SAP, Epicor, IBM Websphere, HighJump) allows you to generate SDS and labels from the product master data. You can do the same thing from a third-party regulatory data provider or a local spreadsheet on your hard drive. This provides you the consistency on every label and compliance document you print at every facility.

With a companion application, Librarian, you can store files in a unified database rather than on variety of hard drives. With all documents in one place, there is greater ease in tracking and managing documents. Beyond that, you can use Librarian to define custom-named workflow states for files in different stages of the publishing process and create rules to govern that workflow.  Now you have single source data management with improved operational efficiency.

A streamlined and efficient labeling process requires centralized management of label access, editing, and printing. In storing your labels in one place where they can be accessed throughout the entire enterprise, you can make changes to the central data source and automatically cascade those changes through the entire organization immediately. This centralized control connects business data with a wide variety of printers and marking devices (standardize formats, symbologies, and security features) while maintaining the ability to meet geographic variances (language, regulations, units of measure), regardless if you have one device at a single location or thousands across the globe. In short, BarTender® offers centralized control of label production. You can print uniform labels at your local facility or deploy labels to printers at each company location, creating standardized productions across your global supply chain.

LABELING & GHS TEMPLATES

BarTender® includes automated, full-color templates to generate compliant, consistent labels. You can then customize the layout to your needs. They are adaptable to container sizes, warehousing procedures, or even corporate branding schemes. You can print labels in any modern language, including all six of the official UN languages which simplifies meeting regulations globally. With BarTender’s® security settings you can lock down any part of a template. Customize settings allows modifications by product, container, geography, business unit or operator. 

With an included automated GHS label template with built-in business rules, you can achieve compliance and use it as a starting point to build labels automatically populated with product data sourced from your ERP system or third-party or internal database. You can then tie the label data to its SDS, helping to meet EHS&S requirements. “The BarTender GHS dynamic label template populates all data, including the mandated product information and GHS symbols, from external sources, fully automating label production. Built-in business rules control GHS symbol arrangement, spacing and color, enabling regulatory compliance.” On the matter of printing your GHS labels: those red borders of the GHS pictograms required a new way of thinking about chemical labeling printing. But that’s exactly why BarTender’s® print architecture is built on Microsoft’s driver standards which makes it an adaptable solution regardless of which printer your company selects.

DESIGN LAYERS & GROUPING FORMATS

By leveraging design layers, you can use them to hold different kinds of information and variable data, and then either include or hide each layer based on user-defined conditions when a label is printed. By using this feature in addition to conditional printing, you can reduce the number of label files you need to create and manage. For example: one chemical manufacturer needed its hazard labeling to comply with the regulations of eight different countries. Instead of building and maintaining eight individual label formats, they built a single format in which each country’s data fields and layout were stored on a separate layer.

At print time, a rule in the label populated the fields on the appropriate layer and printed only that layer.

You can also simplify your label management and improve your data accuracy by consolidating different but related formats into one label file or template. For example: you need to create pallet, case item and shipping labels for a product. If you store these different labels in one label file, you can easily tie all the data fields to the same data sources. When a data source changes, all the labels change. And when it’s time to print, the system only needs to call one file, not four different label files, and conditional printing rules an ensure that the correct number of each label are printed. If you want the complete case study fully illustrating these two aforementioned examples or to learn more strategies for BarTender® labeling  in your enterprise check out this resource.

BarTender® is the chemical labeling solution you need to know about.

You’re facing the pressures of industry globalization alongside the need to comply with GHS while also paying attention to EHS&S and trying to keep business moving at warp speeds. Labeling and documentation is at the core of it all; you know you need a better system. While it seems impossible, it’s not. It’s very manageable with BarTender® employed. And it’s a suitable solution for ICIS top 10 manufacturers to small, regional operations. You get data centralization, systems integration, GHS labeling solutions and templates, design layers and grouping formats, conditional printing and so much more. Get in touch with us today to demo the product and understand how our engineers can help you with a seamless implementation of this critical software solution for your GHS needs.