As part of efforts to enhance laboratory operations for faculty and staff who purchase and/or inventory chemicals, the Environmental Health and Safety and Procurement, Contracting and Payment Services teams are introducing Research Materials Management as West Virginia University’s standard chemical procurement and chemical inventory system.
Following a successful pilot of the platform at Health Sciences, WVU is expanding RMM to all faculty and staff on the Morgantown campus beginning Monday, Feb. 21. The system will be available alongside the current supplier punchouts.
RMM is cloud-based and will reside within Mountaineer Marketplace. The platform offers many benefits, including real-time availability and pricing from suppliers. Features include:
Single-point searches – RMM is integrated with Fisher, VWR, Qiagen and Sigma chemical catalogs. Users can compare size, availability and pricing from a single-source search. Chemicals from eMolecules also are available.
Chemical storeroom availability – RMM allows the Environmental Health and Safety team to catalog and reuse chemicals that are not needed in their current laboratory, thereby reducing waste and reusing current stock.
Container sharing – Given current supply chain issues, this feature allows users to see other laboratories that may have extra chemicals on-hand while performing source searching in the hosted catalogs.
Chemical inventory process changes – Purchased chemicals will be barcoded prior to delivery to the laboratory. Existing chemicals also will be barcoded to eliminate the annual need for paper copies of inventories. This process will be ongoing and occur throughout fall 2022.
Safety Data Sheets (SDS) cataloging – The RMM system will integrate barcoding of containers with inventory for laboratories and join SDS to chemicals within a single system. SDS includes information, such as properties of each chemical, physical, health and environmental health hazards, protective measures and safety precautions for handling, storing and transporting chemicals. SDS are available on the Environmental Health and Safety website via a “Chemical Safety SDS” button.
Structure searching – Users can search substances in RMM via an integrated chemical structure search.
RMM Training
To help prepare for this change, we are hosting Zoom demo sessions in the coming days to walk users through the new features that will be available through RMM:
Note: There is no need to pre-register. You may choose the session that works best for your schedule.
Additional resources, including instructions for placing an order in RMM inside of Mountaineer Marketplace and managing your lab inventory in the system, are available on the Environmental Health and Safety website.
We look forward to rolling out the RMM platform next week. In the meantime, Contact us at RMM@mail.wvu.edu or 304-293-5796 with any questions.