The Material Data Sheet, or MDS, is a core element of IMDS. As the name “material data sheet”
implies, an MDS is an organized list of characteristics which describe a physical material. In
everyday language: if you think of everything we manufacture as having a “recipe”, the MDS is
the list of ingredients for the recipe, and their amounts. Every company which uses IMDS will
have occasion to create, edit, and manage MDSs. Even if a company only uses IMDS to “pass”
information from suppliers to customers, they still need to create MDSs to attach (reference) a
supplier MDS and send to a customer.