New Chemical Gateway System Operational

A new chemical inventory and delivery system—the TTU Chemical Gateway—is now operational. The system is designed to save faculty time and effort and to allow the university to better inventory all chemicals on campus.
Under the Gateway system, chemicals will continue to be ordered by individual researchers and departments. The difference is that all orders will now come to the Central Warehouse, where Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) staff will apply a barcode to the product, and enter the name, amount of the chemical and its destination into the EH&S Assist database. The chemicals will then be delivered by EH&S staff, rather than FedEx, UPS or other delivery service.

To ensure accurate chemical deliveries, departments are asked to provide the following information to EH&S:

• buildings and rooms for chemical deliveries, and
• names of all individuals authorized to sign for chemical deliveries.

Contact Jared Martin at jared.martin@ttu.edu or Brandon Mount at brandon.mount@ttu.edu with this information.

Because the Gateway will inventory chemicals when they arrive at the Central Warehouse, user entries into the TTU online inventory system have been suspended. You will be able to still access the information in the system, but all future entries or changes will be made with new barcodes, as described below. An Excel “Chemical Inventory Template” is available on EH&S's website (www.ehs.ttu.edu) for those who have not entered their inventories into the online database.

The Gateway will serve all on-campus research and teaching laboratories, as well as the swimming pool, golf course and grounds maintenance facilities. Facilities away from the main campus will continue to receive chemicals from delivery companies; EH&S will work with facilities to barcode those chemicals on site.

The new system will not delay delivery of purchases. When an order arrives at the Central Warehouse, EH&S will apply a barcode and enter the amount of the chemical and its destination into the inventory database. This process should take less than a day.

The Gateway also will create a complete inventory of existing chemicals in our laboratories and campus units. Over the next months, EH&S will be contacting faculty and staff of laboratories, and directors and supervisors in the physical plant and grounds maintenance, to set up times to complete the inventory of current chemicals. The PI will be responsible for having all chemicals accessible and ready to be barcoded. EH&S will work with PIs and other chemical users to organize the chemicals according to a numbering system incorporated with the barcode.