Say that you have a program that splits its output into two files, each given by command line arguments. A normal run would be

    <input.txt munge-data-and-split -o1 out1.txt -o2 out2.txt

but since the output is huge and your disk is old and dying, you want to run xz on it before saving it to disk, so use >():

    <input.txt munge-data-and-split -o1 >(xz - > out1.txt) -o2 >(xz - > out2.txt)

If you want to do several things in there, I recommend defining a function for clarity:

    pp () { sort -k2,3 -t$'\t' | xz - ; }
    <input.txt munge-data-and-split -o1 >(pp > out1.txt) -o2 >(pp > out2.txt)