Makersite helps companies find safer substitutes for their products

Makersite launches a tool to detect restricted chemicals and analyze potential alternatives in products.

ChemicalsCompliance

The company

Use Case: Compliance

Department: Product Stewardship

Industry: Chemicals

Challenges:

  • Identifying all the problematic components according relevant regulations such as REACH.
  • Identifying viable material alternatives and their impact on product design.
  • Supporting design decisions with weighted scorecards across multiple criteria.

What you’ll learn

Solution:

  • BOM-centered approach for automated detection of problematic components against relevant regulations.
  • Risk as well as hazard-based approaches to assessments.
  • Automated enrichment for chemical information from multiple data sources.
  • Secure online platform – easy to access and easy to use.

Results:

  • Complete regulatory assessment in minutes instead of weeks or months.
  • Visual reports to support informed decision making.
  • Short integration time and fast ownership of the solution.

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Making better products goes beyond identifying hazardous substances

One of the overarching goals of the chemical sector is to identify and reduce the harmful effects of chemicals in products. Identifying hazards is one step towards this goal, the second being how to evaluate the risk of a hazard to cause harm. This is commonly quantified as exposure. The combination is known as chemical risk and the goal is to minimize this risk. This process is incredibly complex, time-consuming and error-prone due to the manual approaches employed today.

Identifying alternative chemicals that mitigate this risk is challenging and assessing their performance alongside each other is harder. This is mainly due to the lack of data as well as comprehensive benchmark approaches that help in the decision-making process.

Makersite worked with a large chemical association to create a tool that fully automates the risk assessment process based on a methodology used by the European REACH program.

In addition, we developed a multi-criteria decision support (MCDA) approach to find safer substitutes and analyze them across multiple criteria, including cost, compliance, and sustainability. It also accounts for the multiple perspectives of a business such as market segments and internal & external stakeholders.

Automated BOM screening and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

In addition to over 20+ product analytics, Makersite developed new algorithms that combine risk and hazard-based approaches in a fully automatic process to deliver a 360-degree view of products.

Companies can drag and drop their Bill of Materials into the platform to access the chemical risks associated with their product and its ingredients. In seconds.

Restricted substances are also immediately flagged based on global regulations and/or company requirements so stewardship and compliance teams can concentrate their effort on the key problems instead of manually going through every ingredient.

Our Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis tool then enables teams to compare potential substitutes for the problematic components not only along criteria like toxicity and legal risks but also cost and environmental impacts with detailed scorecards. Companies can even weigh their options according to their buyer personas. Finding safer substitutes for chemicals and making the right decision has never been so easy!

Assess compliance in minutes and choose the best alternative

First results in minutes

Checking product compliance takes as much as a drag and drop of the BOM on the platform. Stewardship teams can collect first results in minutes instead of months or years.

Standardized methodology

Chemical risk assessment is standardized, minimizing human error through consistent chemical categorization and a systematic process.

Make better decisions

Designers can now understand the chemical risks linked with their decisions and assess what could be a better alternative with visual reports and reliable data.