Whether you’re at the helm of a small company or a department head looking to save your organization both time and money, vendor consolidation is sound business practice.

Vendor consolidation reduces the number of vendors from which your company purchases goods and services, either by choosing vendors who can provide you with more than one needed resource or simply by limiting the pool of approved vendors with which your company engages.

Bizfluent.com cites four categories of benefits that can occur when you narrow your vendor options:

Cost: Predictable pricing from a known source, reducing the time you spend hunting for new service providers and the ability to negotiate better pricing as a valued, returning customer are three great reasons to consolidate.

Quality and Performance: Any new vendor needs an initial trial period, and that could result in lower quality or poor performance outcomes for your organization, or even time wasted when failed services need to be re-done or replacement products found and purchased.

Agility: When something goes wrong, you want resolution as quickly as possible. Knowing that you have a tried-and-true pool of vendors means you can go directly to someone you trust in order to fix the problem. A long-time vendor is also more likely to respond quickly to your request to keep you as a satisfied customer.

Relationship Management: Simply reducing your points of contact is worth consolidating vendors. “Those vendors become more than simple suppliers or service providers; they become partners. The vendors have a vested interest in making sure the company succeeds, and the company doesn't have to work with a massive number of contracts and purchase agreements.”

With the HSI family of companies, we offer single-source solutions for organizations that want to consolidate their EHS services. Through our Encompass EHS Solutions Platform, we bring together workplace safety training and chemical management into one point of contact and one administrative platform for your total EHS solution. With HSI, you can reduce the number of invoices, systems and logins to streamline your efforts in making your workplaces and communities safer.

If you’re ready to learn more about Encompass, please attend our free webinar on March 15, at 11:00 AM PDT, 2:00 PM EDT. You can register for the webinar by clicking the link below.