Cabela's

No Fishing and Hunting for SDSs at Cabela's When 3E Provides the Gear

Background

Cabela's is the world’s foremost outfitter of hunting, fishing and outdoor gear. Cabela's retail division operates a chain of innovative and popular stores throughout the U.S. As much wildlife museums and education centers as retail stores, Cabela's showrooms provide a truly unique shopping experience. True destination stores, Cabela's showrooms offer outdoor enthusiasts and their families an educational and entertaining shopping experience.

Challenges

As a large retailer with 31 stores (30 domestic and one in Canada), four distribution centers and thousands of products, Cabela’s has been increasingly challenged with various aspects of OSHA compliance, including ensuring consistent access to Safety Data Sheets (SDSs).

“We filed SDSs in binders for quite some time,” said Frann Lubash, Supply Chain Strategy Manager, Cabela’s. “Then we were scanning SDSs and posting them on our intranet for employees to access. But given the sheer volume of required SDSs, we weren’t entirely confident that our database was as comprehensive as it should have been.”

After an incident involving the accidental consumption of a hazardous material in one of their stores, Cabela’s began searching for a more reliable method of managing SDSs. “We took that incident very seriously. While we were incredibly thankful that no one was seriously injured, it was a very compelling wake-up call and it gave us the ammunition that we needed to revisit our strategy for OSHA compliance and update and expand our SDS compliance efforts,” said Ms. Lubash.

Solutions

With an increased sense of urgency, Ms. Lubash began developing a list of criteria for evaluating various SDS management solutions.

“Before I even started evaluating different vendors, I thoroughly researched OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard. I wanted to be sure that the solution we selected and implemented would be able to help us not only manage SDSs but also help us obtain and maintain OSHA compliance,” said Ms. Lubash.

When Ms. Lubash and her team participated in a demonstration of 3E’s 3E Protect tool, they were confident that it would help them more efficiently maintain and update their SDSs as required by OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard.

3E Protect was soon rolled out throughout the entire organization. “Our entire company relies on 3E Protect for SDS management. We have kiosks in all of our retail stores as well as our distribution centers,” said Ms. Lubash.

Users can now access any one of Cabela’s 8100 SDSs via the Company’s own unique online SDS library. Additionally, employees are confident in the information in the system, as it has been prepared and indexed by 3E’s team of professionals.

To further augment their OSHA compliance strategy, the company also created a comprehensive SDS education program after implementation. As part of the program, each site was visited and training on 3E Protect was conducted. “We wanted all of our employees to understand not only why SDSs are important, but also to realize that we take OSHA compliance very seriously and that we are working very hard to ensure conformance with applicable standards and regulations,” said Ms. Lubash.

Following an impromptu OSHA inspection, Cabela’s also decided to adopt 3E’s Transport Services. 3E pre-classifies Cabela’s inventory for packaging and associated requirements and also tracks changes in regulations and adjusts classifications accordingly on an ongoing basis.

Cabela’s relies on 3E services to provide its Hazardous Materials Compliance team with weekly reports by mode, such as main hazard class and regulated versus non-regulated. It also provides the Team with the ability to view classification data by product, required labels for product shipment, and print markings. 3E also supplies Cabela’s with NFPA and HMIS classification data, which is easily accessed through their 3E Protect solution.

The company also adopted 3E Emergency Response services which enables Cabela’s to display 3E’s toll free telephone number on their SDSs, facilitating 24-7-365 emergency response to spills, ingestions or exposures related to their products.

Results

Since implementing 3E Protect, Cabelas’ SDSs are up-to-date, easily accessible and readily distributed throughout the entire company. The interface is intuitive and simple to master, so users from the production floor to management can access and use SDS information efficiently.

“We recently completed an internal audit of all of our outsourced services,” said Ms. Lubash. “We evaluated the ROI of every outsourced solution, and it was quickly determined that outsourcing SDS management and hazardous classifications to 3E was the most cost-effective service for Cabela’s.”

“There are many advantages to using 3E Protect,” concluded Ms. Lubash. “But first and foremost is the fact that we are confident in our compliance. We can proudly say that we are living up to OSHA’s Hazard Communication Standard, and our employees and our customers are safer because of that commitment.”

Location: Worldwide Headquarters: Sidney, NE USA
3E Services: 3E Protect, 3E Emergency Response Services, Transport Services
Industry/Market: Retail
Company Web Site: http://www.cabelas.com