Procurement rarely becomes complicated all at once. It grows one exception at a time: a category that needs a second approver, a supplier region with its own compliance step, a price band that should never go live without review. Each rule makes sense on its own. Together, they create a process nobody can see from end to end. That is the problem procurement orchestration is meant to solve, and it is why we built MarketFlow.
MarketFlow automates approvals, price changes and supplier onboarding on a drag-and-drop canvas that lives inside Axiom. People, systems and AI agents work in one process, with your rules applied to all three.
Complexity isn’t the problem. Fragmentation is.
Most procurement teams don’t struggle because their rules are complex. They struggle because those rules are scattered. The cost tends to show up in the same three places.
The process lives in inboxes
The real process is often a shared mailbox and a spreadsheet nobody owns. Requests stall because no one can tell whose desk they are sitting on, and the only way to find out is to ask around.
Every change becomes a project
A new threshold, a new approver or one more exception goes into someone’s backlog. The process changes at the speed of a release cycle, not the speed of the business.
Bolt-on tools have to be taught your business
A workflow tool that sits outside your procurement platform has to be told what a supplier is, what a purchase order is and what a price approval means. You pay for that translation twice: once to build it, then forever to keep it working.
What makes MarketFlow different from other procurement orchestration tools
Most procurement workflow software sits alongside your purchasing platform and has to be connected to it. MarketFlow is built to run the processes you already have, inside the platform where the work already happens, so workflow orchestration and purchasing share the same data and the same rules.
It already knows your business
Workflows start on real events across Axiom: a purchase order raised, a price change submitted, a supplier invited, a cart completed. They read the details that matter, such as the amount, supplier, category, currency, country and how far a price moved. There is nothing to connect, nothing to map and nothing to keep in sync.
Your team can change it
Build and edit workflows on a drag-and-drop canvas. Add an approver, move a threshold or add a step for one category, then publish it the same day. No ticket, no release and no waiting on IT.
Changes can’t break what’s running
Edits sit in a draft while the live process carries on untouched. You can test the draft on real data, publish when you are happy, and roll back to a previous version at any time. Nothing goes live by accident.
You can see everything that happened
Every run records each step, how long it took and what came out of it. Every approval records who decided, when, and under which version of the process. That gives you a complete procurement audit trail, so when the audit asks, the answer is already there.
How MarketFlow works: six parts, one system
Behind the canvas are six parts that make a drag-and-drop tool safe enough to run real purchasing on.
- It starts itself. Workflows run when something happens in Axiom, on a schedule, or when someone submits a form. You decide exactly when. For example, a workflow can run only on purchase orders over €50,000 from a new supplier, rather than running on everything and filtering afterwards.
- Paths, not checklists. Real processes branch. Send anything over a threshold one way and everything else another. Run two checks side by side and continue once both come back, or once the first one does. Before anything goes live, the canvas checks that the process holds together and tells you what is missing.
- Seventeen building blocks. Approvals, rules, notifications, waits, calls to your other systems and AI steps are all available as blocks your team drops onto the canvas and fills in.
- Approvals with real rules. Send an approval to named people or a group. Require any one of them, all of them, or two out of three. Set a deadline, and attach a form when you need a reason captured, not just a click. You get the control of dedicated approval workflow software without a separate tool to maintain.
- It works with your other systems. Connect your ERP, risk provider or ticketing system using the sign-in method each one expects. Credentials are stored securely and never shown back to anyone, including in the logs.
- It handles failure gracefully. Steps that fail for a passing reason are retried automatically. Steps that fail for a real reason stop and tell you which step failed and why. If a run fails halfway through, it can undo what it already did, so you are not left cleaning up a half-created order by hand.
Three things worth a closer look
Build once, use everywhere
When a team gets a step right, such as a supplier check or a finance notification, it can become a reusable block that other teams drop into their own workflows. Improve the original and everyone benefits, without anyone’s live process changing underneath them.
Build bigger processes from proven parts
Beyond running checks in parallel, you can repeat a step for every line on an order, so a ten-line purchase order gets ten checks without ten copies of the same step. You can also build bigger processes from smaller ones you have already proven.
Pause, cancel or pick up where it broke
Because every step is recorded, you are never stuck with a run that went wrong. You can pause a run, cancel it, or restart a failed one from the point where it broke instead of starting over.
AI agents in procurement, with something to answer to
AI agents are arriving in procurement tools fast, and most of the conversation is about what they can do. But getting a model to draft a purchase order was never the hard part. The hard part is being allowed to let it, and being able to show afterwards what it did.
MarketFlow treats agentic workflows the same way it treats everything else: under your rules.
- It does the reading. Give an AI step a job, such as reading a supplier document and pulling out the terms, sorting an incoming request or summarising why a price moved. It can call your other systems to get what it needs and hands back a clear answer the next step can use.
- You choose what needs a human. Put an approval after any AI step and nothing it suggests takes effect until someone signs it off. Remove that approval once you trust it. It is a setting on the canvas, not a rebuild.
- The action still follows your rules. When the work goes ahead, it passes the same checks as anything else: spend limits, policy and permissions. The agent doesn’t get a shortcut.
- Your model, your choice. Use OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and others, including models you run yourself. Choose per step: something small and fast to sort requests, something stronger to read a contract.
- Every run is on the record. What was asked, what came back, how long it took and what it used are all recorded, in the same place as every other step.
Rules are enforced where the action happens, not on the screen where someone clicks. A purchase order gets the same treatment whether it came from a person, an integration or an agent. That is why switching on an agent in MarketFlow doesn’t need a separate governance project: it doesn’t change who is allowed to do what.
Where teams start with procurement workflow automation
Every one of these use cases runs on something that already happens in Axiom, so procurement process automation can start without an integration project first. For example:
- Purchase order approval: build a purchase order approval workflow that routes POs by amount, supplier and currency. Escalate above your thresholds, fast-track below them, and hold anything that breaks policy until someone resolves it.
- Supplier onboarding automation: when a new supplier is invited onto the platform, run risk and compliance checks side by side, call your risk provider for a lookup, collect the documents you need with a form, and route the result to the right approver.
- Invoice policy checks: check invoices against your policies before they move forward, and send anything that doesn’t match to the right person with a deadline attached.
- Buyer spend limits: apply the same spending limits to every buyer, and route anything over a limit for approval rather than relying on people to remember the rules.
- Catalogue governance: send price and catalogue changes for review before they go live, with a second approver when a price moves outside the band you set.
- Scheduled work: run recurring tasks automatically on a timetable you set. For example, you can drop a saved Lens query into a workflow so a weekly report runs itself and feeds the next step.
And many more…
Powerful enough to matter, controlled enough to trust
Giving a business team a tool that can reach other systems is something IT is right to be careful about. MarketFlow includes these controls from day one:
- It can’t reach where it shouldn’t. Workflows can’t reach your internal network or your own production systems, and IT can block any other addresses.
- It can only do what you’ve allowed. Workflows can only run operations approved for workflow use.
- Credentials stay hidden. Passwords, keys and tokens are encrypted, never displayed once saved, and hidden in run history.
- Teams only see their own. Every workflow, connection and credential belongs to one team, client or supplier.
- Permissions match responsibility. Building, running, approving, publishing and managing credentials are all controlled separately.
- A bad step stays contained. Time and size limits mean a badly built workflow fails on its own without affecting anything else.
- Agents get no special access. An agent acts through the same permissions and approval rules as a person.
- A complete history. You can reconstruct not just what happened, but the exact version of the process it happened under.
Frequently asked questions
What is procurement orchestration?
Procurement orchestration is the coordination of every step in a purchasing process, including approvals, checks, notifications and calls to other systems, so that people, systems and AI agents work in one process under one set of rules. MarketFlow does this inside Axiom, where your orders, suppliers and prices already live.
How is procurement orchestration different from procurement workflow software?
Most procurement workflow software sits outside your purchasing platform, so it has to be connected and taught what a supplier, a purchase order and a price approval are before it can act. MarketFlow starts on real purchasing events, such as a purchase order raised or a price change submitted, and reads their details directly, so there is nothing to map or keep in sync.
Can AI agents approve purchase orders in MarketFlow?
An AI step can read, sort and summarise, and you decide whether a person has to sign off before anything it suggests takes effect. Either way, its actions pass the same spend limits, policy checks and permissions as a person’s.
Conclusion: procurement orchestration that already knows your business
Procurement processes don’t need to live in inboxes, wait in IT backlogs or depend on bolt-on tools that have to be taught what a purchase order is. MarketFlow brings procurement orchestration into the platform where your orders, suppliers, prices and payments already live.
To recap, MarketFlow gives you:
- Workflows triggered by real events across Axiom, with nothing to map or sync
- A drag-and-drop canvas your team can change and publish the same day
- Safe drafts, versioning and rollback, so changes never break live processes
- Approval rules that reflect how your business actually signs things off
- AI agents that work under the same rules, permissions and audit trail as people
- Security controls IT can trust
Want to see it on your own processes? Bring us your messiest approval chain, the one with the exceptions, thresholds and three people who have to sign off in the right order, and we will build it on the canvas with you. Book a discovery call.