Hello,
As many of you know, I‰??ve discussed over the years things we do here at DePauw in terms of chemical inventory management. This summer we did a major overhaul/revamp of our chemistry inventory program, and so I wanted to share a test version of this for all of you. Feel free to log in, add some data, manipulate data, look at data, etc‰?| and see what all this will do.
MSDS‰??s are essentially a link that is generated based on the CAS# (the link becomes msds/cas#.pdf). So if you add a chemical, msds‰??s won‰??t be automatically added. It‰??s not a hard thing to do when you are actually adding data, but it is something that has to be added manually by the person. Easiest way to do that is once you have a program running on a computer somewhere (can run out of dropbox) - you can share a dropbox folder where msds‰??s get placed. There are many solutions, but please just realize that if you add something now, the msds generated link will not work. If you ask me to put a file there so you can see if the link is working, I will. Just let me know.
I use this for complete inventory management here at DePauw. We do campus wide management, meaning facilities and all academic departments (chemistry, biology, geology, art, physics, psychology). This allows us to have multiple users of varying levels.
The most important thing about this management system - it‰??s totally free. I use a backend database site (back{4}app in my case, but there are others) and a javascript/html interface to manipulate the data. With this version there is no reason to ever go to the backend site (but one person would need to be able to do that).
There is a lot that goes with inventory management,and it‰??s very different for different places. This site was built after 15 years of using a commercial product, and then not being able to afford the fact that these are all now cloud based services where you pay per year per user. I have as many users as I want (we have over 40 here), with all of our data (over 8500 unique chemicals) and there is no cost at all to access/store that data. It‰??s very small in the end (the amount of data I store) that I fit below any thresholds that would cause a charge.
One can reinventory using a phone and any scanner app. I print out barcodes for my chemicals as they come in (so that‰??s the unique chemical id that is for each entry). I print them using a laser printer on a label sheet through the campus copier. I print out about 10 sheets, distribute them amongst people who add chemicals, and every now and then print out more. The chemical ID entry is important, and must be generated. If you don‰??t want to print out barcodes, but instead want to just use a sharpie to write a number on, that would work too (or however you want to identify your chemicals). I do not use the manufacturer barcode since that is not a unique number (would be the same for all chemicals with the same name), but you could tailor it however you want.
Please try it out, and don‰??t hesitate to let me know if you have questions or further interest. I think it works well, and as I said for us it is very complete.
The URL I have set up for you all to use is the following:
The usernames I have that you can use to try out are:
administrator: DCHASadmin
admin password: DCHASadmin
faculty: DCHASfaculty
faculty password: DCHASfaculty
Log in as both to see what all you can do (and what limitations are imposed). There is actually a higher level administrator that can do more with the database, but I didn‰??t want to share that one as people can delete all of the data, import large quantities of data, etc‰?| easily.
You are allowed to mess with anything, but please don‰??t change these passwords. If you want to try the user administration stuff (only admins can add/change users), please make a new user. That way it won‰??t change for others as they try it out.
Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks and enjoy
Dave
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