Video: GHS Labels Made Easy with TEKLYNX CODESOFT

So let’s talk a little bit about the anatomy of what goes into a GHS compliant label as well as do a brief demo of the CODESOFT software to talk about a few key features you should keep in mind when implementing a GHS labeling solution.

So we’re going to talk about the six different sections that come from section one of the SDS sheet that should be represented on your GHS label. The first one is the product name or identifier. That is fairly straightforward. Every hazardous chemical is identified by name and that needs to be represented on your label.

The next section is a signal word. There’s only two options for what this signal word could be, but the signal word is either danger or warning depending on the severity and how hazardous OSHA deems the chemical is.

The next paragraph combines two sets of statements, the hazard statements and the precautionary statements. If you’ve ever seen an SDS sheet, you probably have read through all of the paragraphs of warning and different individual statements that need to be represented based on your hazardous chemicals, and yes, every single one of those needs to be represented on your label. Representing that much data on a label can take up quite a bit of real estate and your going to want to keep that in mind when picking a solution to represent that data on your label.

The next section is the supplier identification, and this section is simply a company name and company address that is producing the product. And one thing I want to tie back to AJ’s example is the fact that in shipping product to a member EU company, this supplier identification is not the company that is sending it potentially out of the US, but the record of the importer. So depending on where you are shipping your product, the address and supplier information on your label very well may need to change.

And the last and arguably most important are the pictograms. OSHA is smart enough to realize that not everyone is going to read the fine print and potentially the 15-30 hazard and warning statements on your label, so they have made a series of pictograms to represent exactly what this hazardous chemical could do. Whether it is simply flammable, or it will kill you, or it will will erode your hands and potentially a piece of wood too, or it’s dangerous to breathe. It’s represented by symbols so even when you’re just taking a brief look at this label you can understand what that hazardous chemical may do and how hazardous it is.

So what we want to do now is shift gears a little bit and take a look at an actual label template design within the CODESOFT label design solution. So, I don’t want to give you guys a training session or a full picture of exactly what CODESOFT can do, I just want to spend a minute highlighting a couple of the key features that speak to why we are a great partner to partner with for GHS compliance.

So, the first example is the fact that this one label template can represent a wide variety of different products. Our software gives you the ability to drive data from a wide variety of different data sources. We also offer services to help get the information from your SDS sheets into a readable database so that our software can leverage that data and you can ultimately design one template to represent many, many of your products. And we can work with whatever database your business is currently supporting. Whether it is smaller scale like something as simple as Microsoft Excel sheet or a Microsoft Access database to some of the bigger named database players out there like an Oracle database or a SQL database.

The next feature that I like to highlight when it comes to GHS compliance is the fact that when we shift to different chemicals in our database we are also changing the images. So not only is the data changing like the precautionary and hazardous statements and the description and whether it’s warning or danger, but the actual images are changing. This is a feature that is one of the key things that enables you to allow one template that you maintain to represent potentially all of your hazardous chemicals.

The next feature that I’d like to share is the interactive text object. So, at TEKLYNX we offer a feature within our software that really sets us aside from some of our competitors that allows the text you have displayed on a label to actually interact with an image. This feature alone really allows you to maximize space on your label template. So if you’re looking to potentially label a paint can and you have paragraphs and paragraphs of precautionary and warning statements on it and want those to wrap around the variable images, you can be assured that with TEKLYNX that’s something you can do.

A few of the other features that we’ll just mention rather than show is our ability to dynamically bold data. A part of the regulation is certain words within the paragraphs need to be bold, some of them need to be italicized to highlight the danger and importance of them, and that’s something that our software fully supports.

So the last thing I want to show is revolving around AJ’s use case of the supplier identification needing to change. So you’ll notice over here we have the ship to country selector box. So in the case that we’re shipping to the US or shipping to Mexico, our supplier identification information remains the same. In the case that we’re shipping to Germany for example, you can leverage our label design software to very easily make it so that that address will change based on where you’re shipping it. And given that you have access to the data that appears in multiple languages, based on your ship to country we can have the software very easily change the language as well.

So knowing this, and knowing what we showed you today, I want to tie it into some of the other solutions TEKLYNX offers. So we shared with you an example of our label design and print engine of CODESOFT. We also offer utilities to allow you to have full track and trace on everything that has happened to a template; who printed it, when they printed it, where they printed it. We offer a solution to allow you to seamlessly request print jobs out of your ERP system or WMS system or some sort of custom front end. We also offer fully integrated enterprise labeling systems that will allow you to manage labeling within your four walls and deploy the printing of them globally.