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Setting Up Your Emergency Contact

Module: ChemIQ For: Admin, Manager

Every printed site poster and every employee-facing site binder page displays an emergency contact at the top — a name, a role label, and a 24/7 phone number. This is the offline fallback an employee needs when the signal drops, the phone dies, or the page won't load. Tellus requires it before any poster can be generated.

This page covers the four-field contact record, the rule that all four fields must travel together, the site-overrides-company resolution model, and why job titles outlast names on posters meant to live for years.

What an Emergency Contact Record Looks Like​

A contact record has exactly four fields. All four are required. Tellus treats them as an atomic unit — you don't get to set three of them and let the portal "fill in" the rest.

FieldWhat it's forExample
contact_nameThe name or role title that goes on Line 1 of the poster — large and prominentShift Supervisor on Duty or Maria Sanchez
contact_typeTells Tellus whether the name is a person or a role; defaults to Role title for new recordsRole title or Named individual
contact_phoneThe 24/7 callable phone — validated as a parseable E.164 number+1 (555) 123-4567
role_labelA one-line qualifier under the name; tells the employee at a glance whether they're calling their plant or HQSite EHS Manager or Corporate Safety Hotline

The phone number is validated at save time — the input only accepts numbers in a parseable international format. Free text like "ext. 1234" or "after hours" gets rejected. If you need to communicate an extension or after-hours fallback, put that in role_label or use a phone tree number that handles it for you.

What a Valid Record Looks Like on a Poster​

Three lines, in this order:

Shift Supervisor on Duty Site EHS Manager +1 (555) 123-4567

The phone number is tap-callable from any employee's phone when they open the digital binder.

Site Overrides Company (Atomic)​

Tellus resolves the contact in two layers:

  1. Site level — set on each individual site in AdminHQ > Sites > Emergency Contact
  2. Company level — set in ChemIQ > Public SDS Portal > Emergency Contact panel

When Tellus generates a poster or renders a binder for a particular site, it looks for a valid site-level contact first. If the site has one, it uses that. If the site doesn't, it falls through to the company-level contact.

The resolver is atomic per record — meaning Tellus uses either the site's contact entirely or the company's contact entirely. It never mixes fields across records.

SetupWhat gets used on the poster
Site has a valid 4-field recordSite record used entirely
Site has a partial record (e.g., name but no phone)Site record treated as missing — falls through to company
Site has nothing; company has a valid 4-field recordCompany record used entirely
Site has nothing; company has nothingPoster generation is blocked

Why Not Mix Fields​

Imagine Site B has a coordinator name but the phone field is blank. If Tellus filled in the phone from the company-level record, a poster might render as:

Jane Smith Site EHS Manager +1 (555) 555-CORPORATE

An employee scanning that at 2 AM during an exposure reads it as a clerical error and loses trust in the entire poster. The atomic rule prevents that failure mode — either the site record is complete and gets used, or it doesn't exist and the company-level record is shown as a coherent whole.

What Blocks Poster Generation​

If neither the site nor the company has a valid 4-field contact record, Tellus blocks poster generation with an explicit error:

"Configure an emergency contact at this site, or at the company level, before generating posters. A valid contact requires a name (or job title), phone, and role label."

The error surfaces in two places simultaneously — the Site Posters panel in ChemIQ and the AdminHQ > Sites detail page — so whichever screen you happen to be on, you see the same blocker and the same fix.

Same rule applies to the public site binder page (/s/{token}): if a poster was generated when a contact existed but you later delete the contact, the binder will display an inline error message rather than render a misleading or empty contact strip. Workers need a real number or no number, never half of one.

Job Titles Over Names — Why It Matters​

When you set up a new contact, Tellus defaults contact_type to Role title and shows this help text:

"Job titles age better than names. Use 'Shift Supervisor' unless you have a reason not to."

The reason is simple: posters last for years. A QR-coded poster printed today and hung in a warehouse may still be there in 2030. If you wrote "Jane Smith" on the contact line and Jane left in 2027, the poster has been displaying misleading information for three years — and OSHA inspectors test posters by asking a random employee "who do you call about a chemical exposure?" If the answer doesn't match the poster, that's a 29 CFR 1910.1200(h)(1) finding for inadequate information.

A poster showing Shift Supervisor on Duty with the right phone number is permanently compliant. Use named individuals only when you genuinely have a single 24/7 point of contact who won't change.

When a Named Individual Makes Sense​

  • Small companies (under 20 employees) where the EHS responsibility lives with one person and turnover is rare
  • Companies that have already established a named-individual culture and want consistency with internal materials
  • Worksites where regulators specifically expect a named individual (rare under 1910.1200, but some state Right-to-Know laws differ)

In every other case, default to a role title. The platform will nudge you toward that choice on every new record.

Setting the Company-Level Contact​

  1. Open ChemIQ from the main navigation
  2. Go to Public SDS Portal
  3. Find the Emergency Contact panel (alongside Portal Config, Portal Branding, and Site Posters)
  4. Fill in all four fields and click Save

The company-level contact is used as the fallback for any site that doesn't have its own contact record. For single-site companies, this is usually all you need.

Setting a Site-Level Contact​

  1. Open AdminHQ from the main navigation
  2. Go to Sites
  3. Select the site
  4. Scroll to the Emergency Contact section
  5. Fill in all four fields and click Save

Site-level contacts win over company-level. Use them when:

  • You operate multiple sites and each has its own EHS coordinator
  • A single site has different shift coverage from the rest of the company (e.g., a 24/7 manufacturing plant inside a portfolio of 9-to-5 offices)
  • A site is in a different country or time zone where the company-level hotline isn't the right callback path

You don't need to set a site-level contact for every site. Anywhere you don't, the company-level record handles it.

Where the Contact Appears​

After you save a valid contact record, it shows up on:

  • Printed posters — three-line block at the top of the QR poster PDF (see Site Access Posters)
  • Site binder pages — three-line block at the top of sds.tellusehs.com/s/{token}, with the phone tap-callable (see Site Binder Page)
  • Public per-product pages — used as the emergency contact on sds.tellusehs.com/{slug}/{product-slug} (see Per-Product SDS Page)
  • The "Cache expired" offline message — when an employee's offline cache expires after 24 hours, the contact's name and phone are shown so they can call a human

This is one of the highest-stakes records in your account. Treat it that way — review it annually, update it whenever the role changes, and prefer titles over names whenever the role might.

Permissions​

RoleCan view contactCan edit contact
Admin✓✓
Manager✓Site-level only
Program Coordinator✓—
Employee——

Site Managers can edit the emergency contact for sites they manage. Only Admins can change the company-level contact.