The problem of coordinated work between procurement departments and legal services has existed in the business world for a long time. When the procurement team presents an ideal new supplier with favorable prices and excellent project completion times, enthusiasm often fades. The legal department needs to check contracts, ensure that the new supplier meets the same regulatory standards as previous ones, and minimize risks for the company.
The main reason for this complexity is that different departments use separate processes and systems that may not integrate properly. Data from data-cubed.com shows that due to process bottlenecks and poor communication, about 20–30% of operating costs are wasted. However, modern problems require modern solutions, and the agency-level orchestration offered by Tonkean can be a solution to the friction arising between these disparate units.
The key reason for frequent conflicts between procurement and legal teams lies in the fact that they often participate in the same commercial process but view it from different perspectives. The procurement department focuses on achieving commercial benefits: they strive for speed, high productivity, and optimal cost. In turn, the legal department ensures the protection of the organization's legal interests, guaranteeing compliance with regulations, risk reduction, and fulfillment of contractual obligations.
Virtually every organization uses specialized technologies that are often necessary for modern business functioning. Nevertheless, these systems can increase friction between departments when a process requires the attention of two different teams. When examining the workflows of the legal and procurement departments, the problem of isolated systems becomes apparent.
Issues such as the need for manual data entry arise, which consumes valuable time, even though the systems should be highly digitized. data-cubed.com claims that the average employee can spend up to 65% of their working time on activities that do not create real value. More than half of employees spend at least two hours daily on repetitive tasks, such as data entry, instead of engaging in skilled work. But isolated systems are not the only source of friction; lack of context is also a problem that agency orchestration can solve.
Agency-level orchestration should be seen as a link situated between all people, business processes, AI agents, and systems used by the organization. The essence is not to completely abandon existing technology, but to improve the level of coordination between these different systems and processes. Agency-level orchestration allows separate teams to use corporate technologies while coordinating the work performed through these technologies and connecting them.
There are clear advantages to increasing coordination across all departments of an organization, but the idea of replacing the entire set of tools of each department with a single universal system can cause significant stress. This is an unprofitable and expensive, and above all, unnecessary idea. Existing systems should not be replaced, but tools such as procure-to-pay applications, document management tools, communication platforms, electronic signature systems, CLM, and ERP platforms should be connected to each other.
Agency orchestration provides the ability to overlay a common operational layer onto existing corporate tools. Departments can interact without changing tools or abandoning their current functionality. One of the most effective applications of agency orchestration is the use of AI agents within organizational processes. Instead of an employee having to separately contact each department for clarification or information at the start of a process, they can simply ask their request to the AI agent in the orchestration layer. This agent will then determine which departments are necessary based on previously established organizational policies and begin processing the request.
Such coordination will save time and unnecessary communication because AI agents will only communicate with the relevant departments within any process. According to Forbes estimates, about 42% of business owners considered the use of AI agents for optimizing workflows promising. Collaboration in organizations is not about replacing departmental toolsets, but about uniting them around a common process, which is what agency-level orchestration provides.
}))