The Challenge

A company in the Midwest is a leading provider of products and services for Chemical Management and Compliance. A critical part of its business requires creation and updating of a digital database of Safety Data Sheets (SDS) in order to provide most current hazard information to its customers. This involves acquiring latest SDSs from manufacturers, analyzing SDS information for accurate hazard classification and indexing critical information from SDS into digital database. This work requires a large pool of highly skilled workforce. As a result, the company faced the following challenges: maintaining production infrastructure to provide accurate and up-to-date information demanded by its customers and doing it at an acceptable cost. Furthermore, the work volume varied significantly from one month to the next, requiring the company to manage temporary workforce to meet the flexible capacity needs. The company had to find an outsourcing partner to successfully deal with these challenges.

BPS Solution

BPS first assembled a group of highly qualified and experienced professionals with a broad range of skills to (a) perform web sourcing and phone calls for SDS acquisition, (b) classify health and safety hazards of various materials, and (c) understand and index various properties of the chemicals into online database. This group of professionals included expert Internet researchers, telephone callers, chemists, pharmacists and engineers. BPS first created a team to meet the company's baseline throughput needs. Simultaneously, BPS launched an aggressive cross-training program and created excess production capacity to handle the varying SDS volumes without sacrificing the quality or the turnaround time. Since 2002, BPS has sourced, classified and indexed tens of thousands of SDS per month. BPS has consistently surpassed the turnaround time and accuracy requirements of 99.5%.

Benefits

The partnership with BPS has allowed the company to reduce its operating cost, and provide accurate and most current digital data on environmental, health and safety hazards of the chemicals used by its customers on a daily basis. The company now has full access to high-quality, reliable and flexible production capacity. This has resulted in a very competitive market position, high margins and high growth rate for the company.