Is Your Product Stewardship Program Preparing for Tomorrow?

A comprehensive Product Stewardship Program is a critical component of your organization’s ESG commitments. The collection and analysis of a wide range of data and information related to chemicals involved in manufacturing and final products is a key part of this. Often, this data analysis is done only once or in an ad hoc way. And it is often backward-looking and reactionary, rather than proactive and forward-looking.

• How can leaders feel confident in their stewardship if they are relying only on historical data and science and doing it only occasionally?
• What if they had the ability to comprehensively and systematically review and synthesize the vast amounts of scientific literature published on an ongoing basis?
• What if the holy grail of risk management – the ability to take today’s information and use it to predict what the future may look like – was achievable?
• How can new technologies help Product Stewards gain a fuller view of the risks associated with their manufacturing processes and products?
• What sort of tech exists to help a Product Stewardship Program plan more effectively for the future, while supporting compliance and quality products today?

The volume of toxicological and environmental emerging risk information for chemicals published on a yearly basis is astonishing. Because of this, it is impracticable for one person, or even a team of researchers, to read, synthesize and make meaningful business recommendations based on the extremely valuable information contained in the scientific literature. As a Product Steward, you are responsible for managing the health and environmental impacts of your products. For example, you may be required to substitute a chemical in response to regulatory limits on a previously approved substance. This can be disruptive and expensive for your business. And it can lead to regrettable substitution when identifying a replacement chemical. What can you do to start substitution analyses earlier and to make better replacement decisions so that you don’t have a Groundhog Day experience for the replacement chemical in the next 5 or 10 years, as additional risks to health and safety potentially emerge? As a Product Steward, you are also responsible for ensuring the health and safety of your own team. Modern manufacturing and production often require the use of hundreds, if not thousands, of chemicals. How confident are you that your organization’s Chemical Management processes enable you to understand the risks posed by each of those chemicals stored and used on site? You may maintain robust SDS records, but they are infrequently updated and limited in the range of risks that they capture. They also make it difficult to assess comparative risk from one chemical to the next. Significant time, financial investment and program management are needed to stay current. What if you had the ability to create up-to-date, side-by-side risk assessments of your chemicals in an automated and consistent way? The above scenarios are not uncommon. The good news, though, is that organizations can now leverage emerging technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning algorithms to begin to tackle these challenges in ways never before possible. Benchmark Digital Partners, provider of the award-winning Benchmark Gensuite® solution, has teamed up with Praedicat, a leader in using advanced technologies to identify, track and anticipate emerging risks, to enhance our subscribers’ Product Stewardship programs. Our joint development efforts over the coming months will bring organizations closer to the crystal ball of risk management. Robust synthesis and projection of the science integrated into Chemical Management and Product Stewardship workflows will enable Product Stewards to make better decisions, for both today and the future. Stay tuned over the coming months for updates on our progress and unveiling of  this advanced technology in the Benchmark Gensuite® Product Stewardship platform – a significant step forward in an organization’s ability to see around the corner and prepare for emerging chemical risks.