Material Scout

The challenge today

Material innovation moves faster than evaluation processes

For R&D, innovation, and sustainability teams, staying current with the materials landscape is a structural problem. New compounds, new formulations, bio-based alternatives, recycled-content grades, and high-performance variants emerge from hundreds of manufacturers — at a pace no team can track manually. Industry awareness depends on conferences, sales calls, and personal networks, with the inevitable gaps that come with that.
Sustainability targets and regulatory pressure add a second layer: even when you know which materials might fit, identifying credible lower-impact alternatives that hold up technically remains a recurring exercise. And once a promising candidate appears, comparing it meaningfully against the incumbent material in your portfolio is often blocked by the same problem that affects sourcing — inconsistent data sheets, different test conditions, claims that cannot be reconciled without manual work.

Discover new and emerging materials

Discover new and emerging materials — surface materials added to the network, organised by category, application, and innovation theme

Filter on sustainability and ESG attributes

Filter on sustainability and ESG attributes — bio-based content, recycled content, CO2 footprint where reported, regional sourcing

Explore high-performance alternatives

Explore high-performance alternatives — identify materials offering improved mechanical, thermal, or chemical performance against your current portfolio

Compare against your incumbents

Compare against your incumbents — bring candidates side by side with materials your organisation already uses, on TestID-referenced data

Share findings across the team

Share findings across the team — turn individual exploration into a shared knowledge base

Move into formal evaluation

Move into formal evaluation — when a candidate proves worth qualifying, hand it directly to the Release Manager workflow

Discovery of new and emerging materials

The Material Scout surfaces materials added to the network by raw material manufacturers and compounders across the supply chain. Browse by category — high-performance polymers, sustainable alternatives, processing-optimised grades — or by emerging themes such as recycled-content variants, bio-based polymers, and improved-property reformulations. The view is curated for exploration, not for spec-matching: the goal is to see what is out there, not only what matches a known requirement.

Sustainability as a first-class dimension

Sustainability and ESG attributes are filterable directly, not buried in unstructured datasheet text. Look specifically for bio-based content, recycled content, CO2 footprint where reported, and regional sourcing characteristics. Materials with credible sustainability profiles are surfaced alongside their technical data — so the trade-off conversation between lower impact and performance-ready can be had on real numbers, not on marketing claims.

Compare against your incumbents

A new candidate becomes interesting only when its properties hold up against the material it might replace. The Material Scout lets you place a candidate side by side with a material you already use, on TestID-referenced data, with the same parameter definitions on both sides. Identify where the candidate is competitive, where it falls short, and where it would require further qualification — without rebuilding a comparison spreadsheet by hand.

From exploration to evaluation

When a candidate looks worth pursuing, exploration becomes qualification. The Material Scout hands off directly to the Material & Part Release Manager: define your test requirements via TestIDs, commission accredited laboratories, validate against your acceptance criteria, and release. What you discovered in exploration retains its structure when it enters formal evaluation — no rework, no parallel records.

For R&D and material engineering teams

A continuous view of the materials landscape rather than periodic snapshots; structured comparison against incumbents on real data; the ability to act on a new candidate without losing the prior exploration context.

For sustainability and ESG leads

A systematic way to identify lower-impact alternatives across your material portfolio; sustainability attributes treated as data, not as marketing copy; a basis for sustainability roadmap decisions grounded in current, comparable information.

For innovation and engineering leadership

Reduced risk of being late to identify materials that competitors adopt first; exploration knowledge accumulates as a team asset rather than dispersing through individual notes and conversations; the path from interesting find to qualified material runs on a single platform rather than across disconnected tools.