Safety Knights

Randy, How are things out West?

In my site manager days my company bought MSDSonline for us! We were part of a huge corporation with 300 locations in the US. They gave each location a choice whether they wanted MSDSonline. About 2/3s of us did. I never talked to anyone of the 200 of us that went with MSDSonline that did not find it to be a huge lifesaver for Haz Com compliance! I could never understand why someone would not want to have it! We were in a huge Corporate deal so it only cost each location about $500 a year, an awesome deal! Huge improvement for everyone over the Yellow Notebook system! This was before EHS Velocity bought MSDSonline!

In the fall of 2017 I became a consultant. Every time I saw the "Yellow Notebook System" I recommended to my customers they purchase MSDSonline! By that time EHS Velocity bought MSDSonline. In 2019 I finally had a customer buy MSDSonline. They are a machine ship of about 300 employees. I think it cost them something like $5k a year with a $2500 setup charge,

This last year they had a price increase to $7500 a year. They complained about the price with MSDS but got no where! I hooked them up with Branden Raczkowski who is the administrator of this site. Branden's price was about 1/3. They are waiting for their contract to run out with MSDS to switch!

My advice is not to sign any long tern deals! There are lots of companies in this business and more coming on stream all the time!

Which SDS management software you go with depends on your needs. I've used various SDS management software programs in the past, all with their pros and cons, and all of which performed better in certain areas than others. When I was the Global EHS Manager at a chemical manufacturer, we switched to 3E for our SDS management because it allowed us to not only manage our SDSs that our employees used, but also develop SDSs for the chemicals we manufactured. The price tag was pretty hefty, but we needed a lot more than the average SDS software user since we manufactured various chemicals.

When I was the Corporate Safety Director for an umbrella company that owned machine/fab shops, construction companies, and everything else you could think of, we used MSDSOnline because it was simple to use, the workers could access and print off GHS labels easily on their own, and I could assign chemicals to our various locations across the US, restrict access to certain sites/chemicals based on which OpCo you were at, etc. I can't remember what our final cost was once we added a lot more users to it, but I know that in 2019, we paid $3,200/year (based on a 3-year contract) and it was priced out by how many "licenses" you needed. That was pre-COVID, so I'm sure prices have gone up in the past 5 years. MSDSOnline had a mobile and desktop version. It automatically updated your SDSs that you had on file, then would send an email letting you know that it's been updated and placed in your "eBinder".

If you're just needing basic SDS management without all the bells and whistles, we used Sospes, which has both a mobile and desktop version (and also has other EHS management features if you're interested). If you'd like a demo on this, I can get you in touch with my contact there and they can let you see if it suits your needs. The pricing is pretty competitive, compared to some of the "larger" companies, but for Arrow Safety (a team of 5 people), it works perfectly.

We use MSDSonline. It automatically updates. It has capabilities to create secondary container labels which is very useful. We pay $4k per year for it and that's for both of our locations.

It's ok, I'm here to help ;)

I have not used MSDSOnline or its variants. I have heard both positive and negative comments about their product and service I have used Cornerstone, they are expen$ive but good. About 20k or so. Their tech support, training support on environmental topic like RCRA, SARA, Tier II is top notch. Secondary label printing was very customizable. In addition, they did our Tier II reporting for us and kept us up to date on permitting.
Not everyone has 20k laying around do they? It was a corporate push to get this company.
Another company I have used is Applications International. They have a sliding scale price model. In addition to a the SDS module and the SDS library you will have access to a dozen or so incident modules for injury, spills, vehicle incidents, fires, agency visits, document library, and the list goes on. It is a totally scalable system that they will tailor to fit your organization. They have dashboards and OSHA 300 log cataloguing. It is the best program to make your Excel spreadsheets obsolete.

Thanks for everyone who commented. I have received a ton of demo requests from many of the vendors you mentioned and some that found me through my LinkedIn post.

I appreciate your insight. Now I need to compile a list of "must haves" to try to compare apples to apples.

Have a great day!

Randy