ArkitektHQ

SDS auto-update: how ArkitektHQ keeps your safety data sheets current

A safety data sheet (SDS) is the standardized hazard document that chemical manufacturers publish for every product they sell. Under Canada's Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) and the equivalent OSHA Hazard Communication Standard in the US, every workplace that stores or uses a hazardous product is legally required to keep a current SDS on file and accessible to workers. The catch: vendors revise these documents whenever a formulation, classification, or supplier address changes — sometimes several times a year, often without any notification to the customer.

For most small shops, the result is a binder full of three-year-old PDFs and a quiet hope that the next inspector doesn't pull the wrong one. ArkitektHQ exists in part to fix that quietly and automatically.

What "auto-update" actually does

ArkitektHQ's SDS refresh is deliberately simple and deliberately universal. It works with any vendor. No per-vendor scrapers, no scraping-rules maintenance, no "we don't support your supplier yet."

  1. You attach the SDS once. When you add a chemical to your inventory, paste the SDS URL you already have (from the vendor's website, an aggregator, a bookmarked PDF, your compliance consultant). The app stores the URL and a SHA-256 hash of the bytes.
  2. Refresh re-fetches that same URL. Tap the ↻ Refresh SDS button on a chemical, or let the scheduled worker do it in the background. The system re-downloads the PDF through a bounded 10-second fetch, hashes the new bytes, and compares to the stored hash.
  3. Changed? You get notified. If the hash changes, an AI update agent with a rule-engine fallback decides whether the change is safe to auto-apply (formatting-only tweaks) or important enough to route through a "review this revision" proposal queue (signal word change, new hazard pictogram, new ingredient). You set the per-chemical policy: auto, prompt, or off.
  4. Unchanged? Nothing happens. Most checks find the same hash as last time. No alert, no email, no noise — just a quiet audit row confirming the SDS was re-verified.

Example classifier output

Here's an illustrative slice of what the AI extraction step produces for a single SDS revision:

{
  "product_name": "Lincoln Electric Innershield NR-211-MP",
  "manufacturer": "Lincoln Electric",
  "revision_date": "2025-11-14",
  "ghs": {
    "signal_word": "Warning",
    "pictograms": ["health_hazard", "exclamation_mark"],
    "h_statements": ["H315", "H319", "H335", "H351"],
    "p_statements": ["P261", "P280", "P304+P340", "P312"]
  },
  "ingredients": [
    { "name": "Iron",            "cas": "7439-89-6", "pct_range": "60-100" },
    { "name": "Manganese",       "cas": "7439-96-5", "pct_range": "1-5"    },
    { "name": "Fluoride compounds", "cas": "n/a",    "pct_range": "1-5"    }
  ],
  "physical_state": "solid",
  "extraction_confidence": 0.94
}

That structured payload becomes searchable inventory data: you can query "show me every chemical in the building with H351 (suspected carcinogen)" and get an answer in milliseconds, instead of opening 200 PDFs by hand.

Why universal beats vendor-specific

Earlier iterations of this product maintained a registry of vendor-specific scrapers — one file per manufacturer, each with hand-tuned URL patterns and HTML selectors. That works until a vendor tweaks their site, at which point every customer relying on that adapter silently gets stale data until we ship a fix.

The universal refresh path sidesteps that failure mode entirely. You supply the URL that points to the current SDS for your product. Whether that URL is on the manufacturer's site, a distributor's portal, a 3E / ChemTel aggregator result, or a local mirror you maintain, the refresh job does the same thing: fetch the bytes, hash them, compare. No vendor knowledge required.

If the vendor moves the file, you update the URL once. If the vendor revises the content, refresh catches it on the next check. If you ever want to migrate off ArkitektHQ, your SDS inventory is a spreadsheet of vendor URLs you already own — nothing is locked in a proprietary catalog.

Plan availability

Manual SDS upload and link-only inventory are available on every plan, including Free. Automated refresh (the ↻ button + scheduled worker + AI review agent) is part of Pro + SDS. Enterprise adds role-based controls, the full proposals review queue, and a shared org-wide audit log. Existing customers can switch tiers at any time without losing their inventory data.

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