Rillea Technologies has been working with a wide variety of organizations for 4 years in an effort to help them get value from their WHMIS collection of Safety Data Sheets. We started small with a limited number of clients and a focus on addressing their greatest needs – understanding chemical hazards in the workplace and providing chemical specific training to employees. That was version 1.0.

Versions 2 & 3 were good but ...

That approach of hazard identification and rapid development of chemical specific training has not changed. But as we spoke with customers about their needs we saw opportunities to make it easier. Through versions 2 and 3 the addition of workplace instructions was automated to ensure consistency within organizations, translations were added so that the platform is available in both English and French, Single Sign On (SSO) simplified employee access and API’s were developed to enable information sharing from SDS RiskAssist to learning or inventory management systems.

SDS RiskAssist version 4 is better!

Version 4.0 was propelled forward by our second project with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), who challenged Rillea Tech to build features into SDS RiskAssist that would allow them to quickly identify ingredients of concern from the thousands of chemical products in their collections. As well, we focused on helping clients improve the efficiency of product purchasing. Now when the software reads your SDS it extracts information on the supplier along with every ingredient the supplier has identified in the document. It compares those ingredients to regulatory, health and environmental standards so you have 1-click access to ingredients of concern by location. The result is that version 4.0 now shows two additional pages; Suppliers and Ingredients.

The suppliers page is where you can see who your largest suppliers are, but perhaps more importantly who your smallest ones are. One customer was surprised to learn they where buying 500 products from 125 different suppliers. And 45 of those suppliers only provided 1 item.

Did you know that 3.8 million Canadian suffer from asthma? And that workplace asthma accounts for 10% of adult cases? Are your workplace chemicals contributing to this massive problem? With our new ingredients page, we can help. SDS RiskAssist can now compare the ingredients in your SDSs to a list of over 200 known asthmagens to help answer this question at the click of a mouse. But it is not just asthmagens, we compare ingredients to occupational exposure limits, lists of known or suspected carcinogens along with environmental pollutants such as volatile organic compounds, greenhouse gases and dense non-aqueous phase liquids (DNAPL). And more. We can even create a custom list of ingredients to look for based on your organization’s needs.

The third big advancement that occurred with version 4.0 was the ability to whitelist SDS RiskAssist. The web platform can now be branded by an independent company who can benefit from Rillea Tech’s powerful backend and secondary data.

And we won't stop there! We're hard at work on version 5!

While we are pleased with the version 4.0 upgrades, we have already started work on version 5. As customers gain deeper and easier access into the world of chemical safety, there are more and more opportunities to reduce risk. With version 5.0, we will be focusing on helping you select Safer Chemicals by giving you access to lists of products by purpose (ie Graffiti Remover) with a comparison of the WHMIS hazards and ingredient level impacts. This will allow you to choose products both on hazards and price.

Contact us to get started today!