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According to the RFI, the commercial off-the-shelf document comparison software would be used to inspect pesticide product labels submitted for registration for sale or use in the state.
Currently, the department’s pesticide product registration program manually inspects all pesticide product labels, comparing submitted labels against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s stamped accepted label for specific products.
To put this into perspective, the department receives between 1,500 to 2,000 product applications per year, depending on industry variance, with each label containing anywhere from 1 to 100 pages for review.
The department plans to publish a request for offers (RFO) in 2024 asking for the following software deliverables:
- Must be able to perform inspections between differently formatted documents and file types
- Must be able to inspect graphics, colors, text and layout comparison
- Must provide superscript, subscript and special character inspection
- Must offer robust optical character recognition support, which includes converting an image of text into a machine-readable text format
- Must offer enough customization to tailor document inspections to department-specific requirements like allowing the manual override of built-in features and the addition of a custom dictionary feature
- Must offer application programming interface connectivity support to facilitate communication with the department’s Consumer Protection Division’s business system
- Must offer a cloud-based environment allowing for remote access to service
More information about RFI No. 5510000130 can be found online. The due date for vendors to submit information is Sept. 1.
