Companies to keep an eye on: Reliance Label Solutions

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

The system implemented by Reliance includes a customized version of the company’s Vision GHS labeling software, designed to streamline, secure and simplify labeling operations across the energy company’s multi-site organization.

“Vision” is an apt name for the innovation as Reliance Label Solutions is a company to watch. The Vision GHS labeling software is one of several initiatives by Reliance that will differentiate the processor from the competition and gain trust and loyalty from its customer base in the GHS industrial chemicals market.

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

Reliance Label Solutions manufactures a variety of durable labels including GHS and DOT HazMat labels that can withstand harsh chemical exposure. To strengthen its leadership position in this niche, the company recently launched a program to help customers refine and streamline their chemical labeling processes. The confidential and free technical inspection service called GHS LABEL Profile – short for Leading Assessment for Best Practices and Efficacy of Labels – provides an expert-led assessment to ensure that companies handling and labeling hazardous chemicals , which adhere to compliance best practices.

Troy Lucas, Product Engineer, explains: “The GHS LABEL Profile creates an accessible platform for labeling security and standardization between chemical companies and labeling compliance experts. The Reliance Label team has decades of experience in best practices and can work seamlessly with chemical companies to identify their most pressing labeling compliance challenges. With these priorities in mind, a Reliance Label compliance expert will then conduct an on-site assessment visit, followed by a comprehensive report suggesting practical improvements where appropriate.”

Reliance Label has built an exceptionally family-oriented business. The employees take pride in their work and the products they produce. “The quality and tenure of our staff speak for themselves,” adds Lucas.
From a regulatory/capability perspective, Reliance Labels recently achieved ISO 14001 environmental certification to complement ISO 9001 certification. ISO certification and the associated quality assurance are 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 the stringent labeling requirements of GHS, HazCom and IMDG, Reliance also offers label-related GHS compliant solutions such as printing software, color printers and printer consumables.

In its pressroom, Reliance has several Nilpeter narrow web flexographic presses as well as CEI rewinders with the ability to convert and print sheet, fold and roll formats. Other important equipment on the press includes Martin Automatic Butt Splicer and a PAC matrix removal system.

Lucas notes that the company is currently experiencing growth in the industrial retail market. “Our label customers now require high-performance products with the ability to print compliant, up-to-date information at market-competitive prices,” he says.

Reliance Label’s recent success in implementing the new labeling system based on Vision GHS labeling software for the Canadian energy company is notable for several reasons.

Vision GHS allows companies whose products contain hazardous substances to organize and select the important information their labels must contain. The secure, cloud-based software leverages distributed, on-demand label printing capabilities with centralized content and user controls that enable the production of customizable, high-quality GHS labels. To meet a wide range of GHS labeling needs, Reliance Label Solutions offers three editions of the software: Vision Express, Vision Pro and Vision Enterprise.

Vision GHS offers several efficiency-oriented and resource-saving advantages for the energy company. With the ability to print blank labels on demand – in color, with different logos, branding and OSHA compliance pictograms – the software has helped consolidate the company’s label inventory, improving internal inventory and workflow. Combined with the standardization and centralization elements of the software, the result is an “upstreamization” of labeling practices that makes the entire process easier from the start.

This centralization leads to another key feature – accessibility. With Vision GHS, the energy company customer in Canada now has a reliable and structured platform on which each of its plants, partners and selected third-party providers can create customized, product-specific labels. The setup also allows for intuitive categorization and content consolidation; for example, a simple demarcation between labels that require distinctions, such as “Transportation Dangerous Goods” (TDG) and WHMIS. The system also allows the energy company to limit access for different label types to only relevant parties, a gatekeeping feature that increases security and quality control.

For the energy company, the benefits of engaging Reliance Label Solutions as a unique provider of labels, software and printing systems have become a foundation for seamless label redesign, enabling more aesthetically pleasing labels that precisely meet compliance and specification parameters. In the near future, the customer also plans to integrate the Vision GHS system’s measurement data collection and reporting capabilities into its labeling operations.

Looking to the future of Reliance Label Solutions, Lucas concludes: “We see ourselves as a fully integrated partner for GHS labeling, automated into our customers’ processes.”