From procurement bottlenecks to intelligent workflows

As a leading value-added distributor serving partners and clients across the Middle East and Africa, StarLink manages high volumes of purchase orders, quotations and supporting documents. But many procurement activities still required manual effort from processing incoming emails and validating purchase orders to extracting information from unstructured documents and comparing quotes. These fragmented processes could slow processing, consume valuable employee time and introduce inconsistencies. StarLink wanted to move beyond individual automation tasks and create an intelligent, connected approach that could automate complex procurement workflows end to end while maintaining the visibility, governance and control required for enterprise operations.
 

As part of its Client Zero program, StarLink is working with IBM Build Engineering to apply agentic AI to its own business operations, using procurement as a practical environment to improve employee productivity and build experience with AI-powered workflows. Using IBM® Bob® and IBM watsonx Orchestrate®, StarLink developed AI agents to automate and coordinate key activities across the purchase order lifecycle using the Launch Bob in watsonx Orchestrate capability. Bob serves as an AI-powered development lifecycle partner, helping teams build, test and deploy agents, while watsonx Orchestrate provides the environment to run, orchestrate and govern them. The solution connects with Oracle NetSuite, Docling and Automation Anywhere to automate email intake and classification, enterprise resource planning validation, document processing, quote comparison and accounts payable activities. Instead of relying on separate manual steps and disconnected automation, StarLink can now coordinate these activities through connected AI-powered workflows, improving consistency and visibility across the procurement process.
 

StarLink projects approximately 11,500 hours of annual time savings through procurement automation: 6,000 hours from automating 9,000 purchase orders, 1,500 hours from automating 14,000 quotes and 4,000 hours from quote comparison. The solution is expected to reduce the time needed to compare internal documents, partner purchase orders and vendor quotations from 30 minutes to three minutes, representing a 90% reduction. It also helps sales and accounts payable teams verify that required documentation is complete.

Beyond procurement, StarLink reduced the time needed to develop, test and deploy AI agents from an average of two weeks to two days. This represents 85% reduction in implementation time using Bob and watsonx Orchestrate.

Through Client Zero, StarLink is building firsthand experience with agentic AI that it can draw on as it helps partners and clients across the Middle East and Africa explore practical applications of the technology.
 

Starlink, an Infinigate Group company, is a leading value-added distributor serving the Middle East and Africa. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, StarLink provides technology solutions and services to partners and customers across the region, helping organizations adopt and deploy cybersecurity, cloud, networking and emerging technologies.