Customers Case Studies

Background

The Corrugated Packaging operation of Temple-Inland manufactures container board which it converts into a complete line of corrugated containers, including shipping boxes, retail packaging and point of purchase displays. Operations consist of five linerboard mills, a corrugating medium mill and 70 converting facilities.

Challenge

Chris Weber, one of the corporate industrial hygienists and staff at each of the locations need to manage more than 11,100 MSDSs. Before outsourcing MSDS management to 3E, each of the facilities assigned staff to coordinate and maintain a hard copy of the documents. "With so many people in so many facilities overseeing MSDS compliance, communication was an issue especially communication surrounding our chemical approval process," said Weber.

"There was no handle on our level of compliance," he said. "Everyone, including the environmental staff agreed that this was an issue that needed to be addressed."

Solution

After considering more than 10 alternative solutions, Temple-Inland chose 3E Company.

"It was the logical choice due to quality of service," said Weber. "Our staff is small and 3E provided the service we needed. For example, 3E offered MSDS obtainment, where other services would have required us to collect the documents for them."

To streamline communication and manage compliance, division and corporate staff uses 3E Online-MSDS and 3E MSDS On Demand.

Results

"Now we can save hundreds of man hours per plant in MSDS management," said Weber, noting Temple-Inland also saves tens of hundreds of hours going through inventories a few times a year. "The Chemical Approval module is especially helpful because it flags products that have been added or deleted from our chemical inventory so that we can review and approve their use, enabling us to control what materials are coming into any of our facilities," he said.

Weber pointed also to the amount of time he personally saves. "I can search EH&S listings for a particular ingredient, carcinogen, CAS number or product name, and the system tells me which facility has the chemical, which makes SARA reporting to the EPA a breeze," he said. "What used to be an exercise lasting several weeks can now be as short as an hour."

"It's a good system. We really do like it," he said. "As a whole, we know we're managing our compliance productively and efficiently."

Location:  Facilities throughout the United States and Mexico
3E Services: 3E Online-MSDS with modules: Inventory Management, Chemical Classification, Onsite Inventory Assessment, Labeling, Chemical Approval, SARA Candidate Lists; 3E MSDS On Demand; 3E Poison & Exposure; 3E Spill
Industry/Market: Manufacturing
Company Web Site:  www.temple-inland.com