Business Challenge
The customer, which develops, manufactures, and supplies laboratory instruments, consumables, and reagents for areas such as genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery, also operates a Clinical Diagnostics division providing products for disease detection and monitoring. With thousands of global suppliers feeding into its product lines, the company had historically relied on Excel spreadsheets and internal tools to track the presence of conflict minerals—Tantalum, Tin, Tungsten, and Gold (3TG)—in its supply chain.
Under Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, manufacturers are required to annually disclose whether any of their products contain 3TG sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or its adjoining countries, with penalties for delays in reporting imposed by customers. The manual nature of the existing process threatened to introduce errors, consume excessive labour, and risk non-compliance or delayed filings that could incur substantial sanctions. The workload was so high that employees were threatening to resign and leave.
Sensitel Solution: VeriSupply Methodology
Sensitel deployed a step-by-step VeriSupply solution to automate the entire lifecycle of conflict minerals reporting. First, the company catalogued every component in its products and identified each supplier, along with the corresponding country of origin. VeriSupply then automatically flagged relevant suppliers and issued them a standardized questionnaire to declare any 3TG content in parts or raw materials.
Figure 1: VeriSupply Methodology
Next, the platform validated supplier responses in real time, matched suppliers to smelters, and detected discrepancies instantly. For materials sourced from Covered Countries, VeriSupply conducted systematic due diligence to identify smelter sources, flag at-risk components, and assess the overall product and supplier status. Finally, the system generated a data-rich audit trail and assembled the Conflict Minerals Report (CMR) for on-time submission to the SEC.
Figure 2: Identification of Smelters by Country
Results
VeriSupply provided comprehensive visibility into supplier compliance status with the use of 3TG and the geographic distribution of smelters for a vast network of suppliers for this customer. Interactive dashboards and graphical summaries enabled stakeholders to identify which suppliers were using conflict minerals, where those materials originated, and which smelters were involved, all of which was updated in real-time. This level of transparency significantly reduced the time and effort required to compile compliance data, empowering the company to address potential issues proactively.