Savings from vendor consolidation rarely come from one renegotiated contract. They come from looking at vendors, roles and the resource model together.
The list of vendors grows the way most things grow in a busy organization: one reasonable decision at a time. A tool for one team, a services contract for a project that ended, a second provider brought in because the first was slow. A few years later there are overlapping contracts, duplicated services and costs that have risen faster than the business.
Consolidation starts with understanding what is already there. Which vendors do we pay, for what, under which terms, and who inside the business depends on them. This inventory is less exciting than a new platform, but it is where the opportunities show up.
The next step is to look for overlap and duplication, and to test each service against what the business needs today. Some contracts can be combined, some renegotiated, some ended.
Contracts are only half of it. Role mapping and the resource model matter just as much: who does the work, whether it sits inside or outside the organization, and whether the mix still makes sense. Insourcing versus outsourcing is a real decision, not a default.
At KPMG, a new IT operating model, together with vendor and contract consolidation, negotiations, role mapping and resource-model optimization, delivered 35% cost savings across the portfolio I owned.
The lesson I take from that work is simple. Sometimes the opportunity is not another transformation program. It is understanding what is already there and making it work better.