Procurement has spent years polishing the edges while the core problem stayed untouched. Direct Materials represent the largest source of spend for global enterprises, yet teams still manage them with spreadsheets, email, and tools built for something else entirely. Even at companies like Tesla, the gap between how products are designed, sourced, and financed is wide and expensive.

Spencer Penn breaks down why this happened. Engineering works upstream in PLM, finance works downstream in ERP, and procurement is left to bridge the two without a real system of record. Meanwhile, the industry doubled down on Source to Pay, optimizing indirect workflows while ignoring where the real dollars live.

The result is a market mismatch hiding in plain sight. A $25 trillion Direct Materials problem solved with tools that were never designed for it. LightSource’s thesis is simple: Direct needs its own operating system, built for complexity, scale, and how physical products actually get made.