As organizations close out 2025 and finalize their 2026 priorities, one issue continues to surface across healthcare, financial services, and insurance: vendor sprawl. Vendor consolidation is a strategy to combat this issue. It’s more than an operational inconvenience. It’s an expensive, slow-moving problem that quietly shapes performance across compliance, digital adoption, and customer or member engagement.
Most teams don’t see the full cost until the breakdowns compound—missed deadlines, inconsistent communication, rising support needs, and preventable compliance exposure.
Simply put: the more fragmented the communication ecosystem, the harder it becomes to run an organization efficiently.
How Vendor Sprawl Slows the Organization
What once felt manageable has become one of the most significant barriers to performance and scale. The pain shows up in several ways:
- Costs That Escalate Without Warning
Each vendor brings its own contracts, integrations, templates, and support needs. Over time, these layers create significant overlap—multiple tools doing the same job, each with its own price tag. - Redundant, Heavy Workflows
Separate systems mean separate update cycles, review processes, and maintenance requirements. This drains time from teams who should be focused on strategic priorities, not babysitting outdated workflows. - Inconsistent Experiences Across Channels
When communications originate from different systems, consistency becomes nearly impossible to maintain. Branding drifts, messaging varies, and customers or members receive mixed signals. - Higher Compliance Exposure
Fragmented communication workflows introduce delays and create blind spots. For organizations bound by strict regulatory timelines, this can quickly become a risk factor. - IT Resources Pulled in the Wrong Direction
Instead of modernizing the communication environment, IT teams spend their time managing integrations, troubleshooting vendor conflicts, and patching workarounds.
A Real-World Example: $6 Million Saved by Consolidating Vendors
One of our healthcare clients was navigating this exact set of challenges. They operated across multiple business lines, each with different vendors managing parts of their communication lifecycle. The environment was expensive, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.
After unifying everything under a single platform, the results were substantial: more than $6 million in annual savings.
The savings came from eliminating redundant software, reducing the complexity of print and digital fulfillment, consolidating templates, and giving internal teams control over updates that previously required external support.
The impact wasn’t just financial. The organization gained stronger compliance readiness, faster turnaround times, and a more consistent member experience. This level of improvement is standard once the operational clutter is removed.
Why Vendor Consolidation Should Be a 2026 Priority
With budgets tightening and expectations rising, leaders are looking for strategies that deliver immediate impact while strengthening long-term performance. Consolidation meets both of those needs.
Beyond cost reduction, consolidation provides:
- Streamlined regulatory updates
- Better visibility with unified reporting and analytics
- Reduced operational risk
- Faster execution across print and digital channels
- A more predictable communication model
- A stronger foundation for digital adoption
The organizations that address vendor sprawl now will start 2026 with a sharper focus, fewer points of failure, and a communication environment that can support their broader goals.
Questions Worth Asking as You Plan for 2026
If you’re evaluating next year’s priorities, these questions help reveal where vendor sprawl is holding you back:
- How many vendors are involved in our communication lifecycle?
- Where do we see duplication or overlap?
- How often do updates require multiple teams and multiple vendors?
- How much time is lost coordinating between systems?
- What opportunities could we unlock with a unified platform?
Most organizations discover far more waste—and far more opportunity—than they expected.
