As a global company, Nike is constantly innovating the materials that go into their products to be safer and more sustainable, and they needed help coordinating and prescreening these changes with a wide range of suppliers. To do this in a time-efficient manner, they needed a system that could deliver accurate chemical assessments quickly. Enter SciveraLENS®. With this secure portal, Nike has been able to: 

• Innovate new materials more safely 
• Prescreen chemicals from suppliers to make efficient and informed sourcing decisions 
• Build a dashboard infrastructure for easy communication with their team and suppliers  
• Meet sustainability goals and avoid regrettable substitutions 

Read on to learn more about Nike’s experience with SciveraLENS from the team itself. 

1. How does SciveraLENS help you save time and do more?

“Because of Scivera, I have the opportunity to dig in deeper on some bigger questions that need more of my expertise….as opposed to chasing down research on all these chemicals since I can get through all the information really quickly with SciveraLENS.”—Will Mbiya, Chemistry Manager

2. How does SciveraLENS help you take a more proactive approach to product development?

“One of our goals related to all of our chemistry assessments is that our chemical suppliers give us preferred chemicals. By using SciveraLENS they can, just based on dashboards, understand that if there are big red dots that isn’t something we want them to be bringing us. It’s very helpful. We actually have some of our chemical suppliers that have been using SciveraLENS to assess what they will bring to us before they bring it to us. That saves us time and also allows them to reformulate and look at things from their side before bringing it to us.”—Renee Hackenmiller-Paradis, Lead, Chemistry Center of Excellence, Global Sustainability

3. How does SciveraLENS help you avoid regrettable substitutions?

“We use SciveraLENS for several purposes: to assess chemicals themselves and against other chemicals, to work with teams to do chemical exploration for product development, to research more deeply into a specific chemical, and for phase-outs to avoid regrettable substitutions. For phase-outs, very rarely is there a replacement where we can switch chemical A for chemical B so easily. And so, understanding all chemicals used in a new process is really important because we don’t want to make a regrettable substitution, where we start using something that may not be regulated right now, but it is just as bad as what it is replacing.  
 
To avoid regrettable substitutions, usually we’ll enter several chemistries into SciveraLENS to see how they stack up. We will do a little bit of research beforehand and coordinate with some teams to see what some alternative might be. Sometimes it’s a quick result, and sometimes we have to dig a little deeper into the chemical information in SciveraLENS to better understand a particular use case. Either way, it’s exceedingly helpful to make sure we’re always able to innovate safer products.” —Renee Hackenmiller-Paradis, Lead, Chemistry Center of Excellence, Global Sustainability