CHICAGO, Sept. 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kodiact today announced the launch of its AI-native platform that brings intelligent simulation to direct materials for the first time. Built initially for food, beverage, and CPG manufacturers but designed for use across all direct-materials-driven industries, Kodiact connects every material to its underlying price drivers and every decision to a unified ledger, giving operators the ability to see what will happen next, not just what has already occurred. Manufacturers can buy the same ingredient from the same supplier in the same month and still pay a 16% different price. That striking 16% gap persists largely because 62% of that price difference remains a year later, driven by upstream volatility that traditional category management tools fail to catch.
Direct materials represent up to 60% of manufacturing revenue, yet procurement teams still rely on backward-looking tools, where ERPs show past payments, spend cubes report the same data, and dashboards visualize history in color. Meanwhile, the critical decisions, when to move on raw materials, whether to lock twelve months of ingredient or packaging, live in someone's head. Procurement does not need another system of record or yet another dashboard; it needs a system of judgment that guides what to do next and preserves the reasoning when team members move on. Kodiact is built to close that gap.
Research from The Hackett Group, 2026 Procurement Key Issues Report, shows that 69% of organizations run category management on Excel, only 9% use a dedicated category management solution, and just 6% reach "Leading" maturity. At the same time, procurement workload is projected to rise 8.0% while staffing falls 0.9%, widening the productivity gap when supply continuity is top priority.
Kodiact addresses this through a three-layer architecture built on a single canonical model:
- The Data Layer (What is true): A continuously updated representation of every material, input cost chain, supplier position, and margin floor that reveals price formation upstream and replaces fragmented spreadsheets.
- The Operating Layer (What you do): Execution intelligence transforming strategies, workflows, and decisions into a living system that features auto-updating category strategies, automated project analysis via agents, and a complete decision ledger.
- The Simulation Layer (What happens next): A simulation engine enabling teams to model multi-variable shocks across materials, suppliers, demand, and energy, seeing ripples weeks before the P&L is impacted.
"Kodiact exists to solve the hardest problem in procurement: direct materials volatility, complexity and risk," said Steve Tucker, Co-Founder and CEO. "Manufacturers have been forced to make multimillion-dollar decisions with fragmented data, static strategies, and no way to see the ripple effects. With Kodiact, they finally have a simulation layer that shows what happens next, and a single operating layer that connects strategy to execution."
"Kodiact is the first AI-native simulation platform for direct materials," said Jonathan Lee, Co-Founder and CTO. "It codifies strategy, unifies execution, and enables simulation across thousands of forward paths. For the first time, manufacturers can see the full impact of a decision before they make it. And critically, unlike standard LLMs, Kodiact guarantees strict data isolation, ensuring customer data, strategies, and supplier information are never mixed or exposed to shared public models."
The Hackett Group recently spotlighted Kodiact's approach. As Bertrand Maltaverne, Senior Research Director at Hackett, noted: "As the saying goes, vision without execution is hallucination. Kodiact finally brings a solution to direct materials that goes far beyond just category management. It matches the need for agility and velocity to actual capabilities."
Kodiact surfaces margin-at-risk weeks before it reaches the P&L, while the simulation engine continuously learns from team interactions. Already in use across multiple FMCG and CPG manufacturing pilots, teams are reducing category cycle times from 8-12 weeks to minutes, automating strategy generation, and uncovering hidden supply risks.
Kodiact will introduce additional operating modules, including Marketplace, Trade Desk, Planning, and Innovate, over the course of the next 12 months.
About Kodiact
Kodiact is the Intelligent Simulation Platform for Direct Materials. Purpose-built for volatile categories, it connects every material to its price drivers and decisions to one ledger through its data, operating, and simulation layers. Kodiact is not a system of record or dashboard, but a system of judgment built with operators from across FMCG.
Learn more at Kodiact.com.
For press inquiries contact: jessica.warren@kodiact.com
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c683a108-3b0f-499f-abf8-e827c1db3c82
