Direct‑materials tech market heating up

Hotels and restaurant groups are starting to shop for software that was built for factories, not front desks. That sounds backward until you look at what keeps breaking: linens, food, packaging, cleaning chemicals, maintenance parts, and the supplier promises behind them. Analysts at Spend Matters said direct‑materials management has become a hotter category as companies focus more on physical supply continuity and less on invoice processing alone. (spendmatters.com) “Direct materials” usually means the physical inputs that go into a product, like steel for a car or fabric for a shirt. In hospitality, the equivalent is the stuff that directly shapes the guest experience at a property: the towel in the room, the salmon on the plate, the coffee in the lobby, and the replacement part that keeps an ice machine running. (netsuite.com) For years, a lot of business software treated purchasing as a paperwork problem. The core job was to route approvals, match invoices, and squeeze savings out of indirect spend like office supplies, travel, or generic services. That works when the pain shows up in accounting. It works less well when the pain shows up as an empty shelf or a broken service promise. (spendmatters.com) Recent disruptions changed the order of priorities. Spend Matters says supply shocks pushed companies to care more about whether goods would actually arrive, in the right quantity and quality, than whether the back office could process the bill efficiently. That shift pulled more attention toward software designed for direct spend, where supplier collaboration and material flow matter every day. (spendmatters.com) That is where a company like Procurence comes in. Spend Matters describes Poland‑based Procurence as a provider that has evolved from a focused supplier management tool into a broader collaboration and integration platform for direct materials. Its product, Meercat, now ties together sourcing, quality, risk, environmental and social governance, and supplier collaboration in one system. (spendmatters.com) Procurence’s own product description shows why this category is widening. The company says Meercat supports supplier lifecycle work from registration and onboarding through classification, performance, risk management, development, and phase‑out. It also says the software supports both line production and project or service‑oriented organizations, which helps explain why the same approach can start to look useful outside classic manufacturing. (procurence.com) Hospitality has long had procurement needs, but many operators still run them in fragmented ways. NetSuite’s hospitality procurement guide says hotels, restaurants, venues, and travel businesses depend on procurement to manage cost, cash flow, supplier risk, and quality. In practice, many groups still rely on local property habits, email chains, and spreadsheet trackers, especially when each site has its own vendors and stock routines. (netsuite.com) (smartsheet.com) That creates a familiar problem: every property can look organized on its own and chaotic at the group level. One hotel may know it is short on a housekeeping item, another may have excess stock, and headquarters may not see either issue until service slips or margins do. Spreadsheet‑based operations templates are common enough that entire template libraries exist for hotel management, which is useful for local control but weak for cross‑property visibility. (smartsheet.com) Factory software was built for a harsher version of that problem. Manufacturers need to know which supplier is late, which component failed quality checks, which site is exposed to risk, and which alternate source can step in before production stops. That is why direct‑materials platforms tend to combine sourcing, supplier data, quality signals, and risk monitoring instead of treating each one as a separate department’s spreadsheet. (spendmatters.com) (procurence.com) Spend Matters’ April 8, 2026 note suggests that this logic is now spreading. The firm says platforms originally pitched at manufacturers are starting to look more relevant for hospitality groups that want to move beyond spreadsheets and property silos. That does not mean hotels suddenly need factory jargon. It means they increasingly need the same kind of visibility into physical goods, supplier performance, and continuity risk. (spendmatters.com) The market evidence points the same way. Spend Matters’ vendor analysis archive shows a steady run of coverage on direct‑materials and adjacent supply technologies in 2025 and 2026, including providers focused on sourcing, costing, manufacturing analytics, drawing management, and supplier collaboration. That pattern does not prove a boom by itself, but it does show analyst attention clustering around a category that used to get far less mainstream procurement coverage. (spendmatters.com 1) (spendmatters.com 2) Hospitality already has large centralized buying organizations, which makes the next step easier to imagine. Hilton Supply Management, for example, markets global supply chain management and hospitality procurement services to properties. The newer twist is not centralized purchasing by itself. The newer twist is software that watches the physical flow of goods and supplier health with more of a manufacturing mindset. (hsm.com) So the headline is not really about one vendor. It is about procurement software moving closer to operations software. When companies worry less about whether a purchase order was approved and more about whether breakfast ingredients, room supplies, or repair parts will actually show up, the tools that win start to look very different. (spendmatters.com)