Validation of ReachExchange solution for Reach compliance

22 July 2008

Atrion International, Inc announced the completion of its ReachExchange beta testing program with seven large multinational clients. The results of the beta testing validated the ease-of-use and practicality of ReachExchange’s bidirectional exchange of data between Atrion’s Intelligent Authoring (IA) application and local instances of a company’s IUCLID 5 system - the tool for registering chemical substances under the Reach legislation.

“The European Chemical Bureau’s (ECB) IUCLID 5 license agreement prohibits companies from directly interfacing a third party system with IUCLID 5, which could potentially result in redundant and inconsistent data, and in the long run affect a company’s reputation,” explains Patrick J. Lavoie, President of Atrion International. “We developed ReachExchange to enable companies to overcome this limitation, all while working within the confines of the IUCLID 5 license agreement.”

Atrion’s IA application automates the creation of globally compliant and multi-lingual Material Safety Data Sheets (M)SDS, labels, hazard summary sheets as well as documents related to transportation, inventory reports and more. ReachExchange in combination with Atrion’s IA application allows the transfer of data and necessary classification information to the central IUCLID 5 system.

ReachExchange interface eliminates risks associated with inconstant data between registration dossiers and SDS’s, due to duplicate data entry. This is an important, costly and time consuming hurdle to overcome for companies, especially as they begin to devote scarce internal resources in order to prepare for Reach pre-registration which starts on June 1st, 2008.

DSM participated in the Beta test and is satisfied with the results. DSM’s Product Safety Advisor cited that the way in which data was exported from IUCLID 5 and imported into Atrion’s IA application via ReachExchange clearly demonstrated the convenience and accuracy of entering data only once, thus eliminating errors associated with redundant data entry.

"With ReachExchange, we can calculate the First Aid, Storage and Handling and Transport in Atrion’s IA application and export it to IUCLID 5 via ReachExchange”, said Gerard Kulk, Team Leader, Materials Compliance Support at Akzo Nobel, “This enables us to leverage the same data across both systems saving our organisation considerable time."

As result of their involvement in Atrion’s beta testing program, the participating companies have expressed confidence in their ability to import data into and to export data from Atrion’s IA application via ReachExchange for the generation of registration dossiers and extended SDS for Reach in a timely manner.