www.reliancelabel.com
By Steve Katz

Reliance Label Solutions is a label manufacturer based in Paola, KS, just outside of Kansas City. The company specializes in manufacturing hazardous container labels for the petroleum, chemical, and environmental industries, and recently announced that it successfully equipped a prominent Canadian energy company with a centralized solution for versioning-capable on-demand labeling for a broad range of products.

The system that Reliance implemented comprises a tailored iteration of the company’s Vision GHS Labeling Software, which is serving to streamline, safeguard, and simplify labeling operations throughout the energy company’s multi-location organization.

“Vision” is an apt name for the innovation, as Reliance Label Solutions is a Company to Watch. Vision GHS Labeling Software is one of several initiatives created by Reliance that sets the converter apart from the competition, earning trust and loyalty from its client base in the GHS industrial chemical market.

The company got its start in 1969 as a department of Graphic Technology Incorporated (GTI). In 2003, Reliance Label Solutions was officially purchased and named by Jay Frankenberg. Since then, it has grown into an ISO 9001:2015 certified industry leader for GHS compliance labeling.

Reliance Label Solutions manufactures a variety of durable labels, including GHS and DOT HazMat, that can withstand harsh chemical exposure. Reinforcing its leadership position in this niche, the company recently launched a program designed to help clients hone and streamline their chemical labeling operations. Called the GHS L.A.B.E.L. Profile – short for Leading Assessment for Best Practices and Efficacy of Labels, the confidential and complimentary technical inspection service provides an expert-driven assessment to help ensure companies handling and labeling hazardous chemicals follow compliance best practices.

Troy Lucas, product engineer, explains, “The GHS L.A.B.E.L. Profile creates an accessible labeling safety and standardization platform between chemical companies and labeling compliance experts. Steeped in best practices accrued over decades, Reliance Label’s team can seamlessly engage with chemical companies to determine their most pressing labeling compliance challenges. With an eye to these priorities, a Reliance Label compliance expert then conducts an on-site assessment visitation, followed by a comprehensive report that offers practical improvements where appropriate.”

Reliance Label has built an exceptionally family-oriented company. Employees take pride in the their work and the products they produce. “The quality and tenure of our personnel speaks for itself,” adds Lucas.
From a regulatory/capabilities standpoint, Reliance Labels recently obtained ISO 14001 environmental certification to supplement its ISO 9001 certification. ISO certification and the quality assurance it provides is just one of several reasons why companies in the petroleum, chemical, and environmental industries turn to Reliance Label Solutions.

While the company is best known for chemical drum labels that meet stringent GHS, HazCom and IMDG labeling requirements, Reliance also offers labeling-adjacent GHS-compliant solutions such as printing software, color printers, and printer consumables.

In its pressroom, Reliance has multiple Nilpeter narrow web flexo presses, as well as CEI rewinding equipment with the capability to convert and print in sheets, folds, and roll formats. Additional, critical on-press equipment includes Martin Automatic butt splicers and a PAC matrix removal system.

Lucas points out that the company is currently seeing growth in the industrial retail market. “Our label customers have come to need high performance products with the ability to print compliant, up-to-date information at market-competitive prices,” he says.

Reliance Label’s recent achievement in implementing the new labeling system based on Vision GHS Labeling Software for the Canadian energy company is noteworthy for a variety of reasons.

Vision GHS enables companies whose products contain hazardous materials to organize and select the vital information their labels must include. The secure, cloud-based software utilizes on-demand distributed label printing functionality, with centralized content and user controls enabling production of customizable, high-quality GHS labels. To meet a broad range of GHS labeling needs, Reliance Label Solutions offers three editions of the software: Vision Express, Vision Pro and Vision Enterprise.

For the energy company, Vision GHS is providing several efficiency-minded, resource-sparing benefits. By allowing blank labels to be printed on-demand – in color, with varying logos, branding and OSHA compliance pictograms – the software has helped consolidate the company’s labelstock for improved internal warehousing and workflow. Combined with the software’s standardization and centralization elements, the result is an “upstreamization” of labeling practices that make the entire process simpler from inception.

This centralization yields another key attribute – accessibility. With Vision GHS, the energy company customer in Canada now enjoys a reliable and structured platform from which each of its plants, partners, and selected third-party vendors can create tailored, product-appropriate labels. The setup also allows for intuitive categorization and content consolidation; for example, easy delineation between labels requiring distinctions like Transportation Dangerous Goods (TDG) and WHMIS. The system also lets the energy company limit access for various label types to only relevant parties, a gatekeeping feature that heightens security and quality control.

For the energy company, the benefits of engaging Reliance Label Solutions as its singular label, software, and printing system vendor have become a foundation for seamless labeling redesign, allowing for more aesthetically pleasing labels that remain squarely within compliance and specifications parameters. In the near future the customer also plans to incorporate the Vision GHS system’s metrics gathering and reporting capabilities into its labeling operations. 

As for the future of Reliance Label Solutions, Lucas concludes, “We see ourselves becoming a fully integrated partner for GHS labeling, automated within our customers’ processes.”