Tantalum is a metallic element with a major role in global supply chains due to its unique properties and widespread applications across various industries. It is utilized in diverse end products such as medical implants, aerospace components, capacitors, aircraft engines, gas turbines, GPS devices, and smartphones. Its impact is so great that over 224,000 companies are only three tiers away from tantalum suppliers, as Daniels discovered using Exiger’s technology.  

Yet, despite its crucial role, the extraction of tantalum poses ethical challenges, as a significant portion is sourced from small-scale mines where child labor and exploitation are prevalent. So, how can organizations identify and address unethical practices effectively to ensure that their operations do not inadvertently support forced labor?

The answer is to curate, prioritize, evaluate, and monitor your supply chain — as this provides access to critical data that can make due diligence a less cumbersome process. The process is too cumbersome to handle manually, but AI solutions like the 1Exiger platform can efficiently process the volume of data involved.

“Let’s say you’ve got 22 Tier 1 suppliers and 1,500 Tier 3 suppliers,” Daniels said. “You can see where they are and where they’re located. So, you can get visibility into each of the subsequent tiers of your supply chain. And then, because you’ve aggregated this data from your own infrastructure and from open-source data, you’re able to ask simple questions: Who are my 10 riskiest suppliers? Why are they risky? What actually produces the risk here? From there, you can get answers telling you how that risk is, how it evolves, and how it impacts you.”