Some applications of a new approach to factorization

As highlighted in a series of recent papers by Tringali and the author, fundamental aspects of the classical theory of factorization can be significantly generalized by blending the languages of monoids and preorders. Specifically, the definition of a suitable preorder on a monoid allows for the exploration of decompositions of its elements into (more or less) arbitrary factors. We provide an overview of the principal existence theorems in this new theoretical framework. Furthermore, we showcase additional applications beyond classical factorization, emphasizing its generality. In particular, we recover and refine a classical result by Howie on idempotent factorizations in the full transformation monoid of a finite set.