Consumer goods companies are under pressure to cut costs without limiting growth. This article explores how company leaders can simplify fragmented technology systems, improve operational efficiency and create capacity for growth. It also considers the role of AI, data and governance and how a business-outcome-led approach to tech investment can deliver more sustainable value.
Growth and efficiency are now almost level on the leadership agenda. This year’s Transformation Index, based on a global IDC study of 750 senior leaders, found that 44% of organisations rank growth among their top three priorities, with efficiency just behind at 43%.₁
For consumer goods leadership teams, the challenge is delivering both at once. Technology investment should help, but fragmented estates can absorb significant spend just to maintain what’s already there. Companies end up paying twice: first for overlapping systems, integrations and manual workarounds. Second, through lost speed and flexibility as disconnected customer, commercial and supply-chain information slows decisions and makes growth opportunities harder to pursue.
Cutting the number of systems can reduce some of that cost but it only addresses part of the problem. Fragmentation often reflects wider complexity in the business, from processes that differ across brands and markets to blurred ownership and competing priorities. It can also reflect how teams, budgets and decision-making are organised, with different parts of the business making technology choices independently. Unless you address those issues too, you risk reducing the technology estate without improving operations.
Tackling the causes of fragmentation as part of technology rationalisation can reduce costs while giving your business greater capacity to grow.
Identify the root cause of your fragmentation
Technology estates grow project by project, often in response to a specific request. New systems are rolled out while existing ones remain, adding layers of complexity over time. As the estate expands, ownership becomes blurred and your business loses a coherent view of what technology it has and who is responsible for it.
Where teams have separate budgets, priorities and decision-making processes, they may also invest in overlapping solutions without considering the wider business. Technology fragmentation can therefore be a symptom of organisational fragmentation, not just a systems issue. That’s why rationalisation needs to start with the business outcome you want to achieve, rather than the tech you want to remove.
Before you begin tendering for a new system, examine and simplify the processes needed to deliver that outcome, then define the operating model, data requirements, ownership and governance that support them. This includes understanding how decisions are made across teams and where responsibilities or approval processes create unnecessary complexity. It may be the less glamorous part of technology transformation but this lays the foundations for success: without it, a new system risks simply carrying existing complexity into a different platform.
Mapping your digital estate
We saw the importance of clear visibility with a major transport operator whose customer-facing digital estate had grown across numerous sites and systems. Teams didn’t always know which sites were still live, making it harder to manage the processes and decisions associated with them.
By mapping the company’s digital estate, Gate One created a shared view of sites, technologies and dependencies. The client could then agree ownership, decision rights and governance before assessing which systems continued to serve a useful purpose.
Don’t assume fewer systems mean a better setup
Tech rationalisation can cut licensing, maintenance and integration costs but fewer systems don’t necessarily mean better value.
Take an expensive system used by relatively few people. On paper, retiring it looks like an easy saving. But if those users rely on that system for a critical customer journey or business process, removing it could cause significant disruption.
You also need to consider everyone who interacts with the system, balancing the needs of end users with those of the teams responsible for administering and supporting it. Rationalisation shouldn’t simplify one group’s experience at the expense of another.
Take a phased approach
Consolidation can also create new dependencies. We saw this at a multi-brand business that brought its operations into a single technology stack. Because everyone shared the same platform, decision-making became more centralised, with changes for individual brands requiring wider agreement and approval. Relatively small changes could become group-wide decisions, creating bottlenecks that slowed delivery and limited the brands’ ability to respond quickly to local needs.
This example highlights the risk of consolidating technology without considering how decisions will be made and changes delivered. Moving to a single target stack in one “big bang” can create considerable complexity and disruption, so it makes sense to rationalise technology in stages.
Some systems can be consolidated quickly, while others may need to remain in place or improve gradually over time. A phased approach may cost more upfront than a rapid consolidation but it can significantly reduce implementation risk and avoid the cost and disruption of resolving problems after go-live.
For each stage of transformation, consider the value, usage, risk and cost of the systems in scope:
A phased approach gives you more control over the pace of rationalisation and prioritising each stage by business value, usage and risk focuses investment where it will have the greatest impact. The goal is to make your technology estate work harder for your business, rather than pursuing the lowest possible application count.
AI can amplify existing complexity
AI adoption is moving quickly across the consumer goods industry but returns aren’t always following. Our Transformation Index found that, across all industries, only one in three generative AI and AI agent initiatives meet expectations.
Fragmented processes, unreliable data and unclear ownership make it harder to get value from AI. Teams see strong results from individual use cases but those benefits remain within one part of the business. Meanwhile, other teams develop similar solutions, often using different tools and measures of success, leaving you without a clear view of which investments are creating value.
Bringing AI into your wider technology portfolio helps prevent another set of disconnected initiatives from emerging. Tie each investment to a specific business outcome and consider the end-to-end process it supports, alongside the data and governance it depends on.
Four factors can help you decide where to prioritise AI investment:
- Business outcome: Does the use case contribute to a defined result worth investing in?
- Scale: Could it extend across teams or functions?
- Readiness: Do you have trusted data, defined ownership and suitable governance?
- Adoption: Can people easily incorporate the tool or agent into their work?
Adoption is particularly easy to underestimate. An AI agent may perform its assigned task brilliantly but if the next stage still relies on a spreadsheet, manual hand-off or legacy process, its contribution to the wider business remains limited.
Before committing to major AI initiatives, look at where work is already slowing down. Improving the speed and efficiency of peer reviews and QA, for example, may unlock more immediate value than introducing another tool. Refine your core processes and remove delivery bottlenecks first, then decide where AI has the strongest business case and potential to scale across your organisation.
| Factor | Assess |
|---|---|
| Business value | Which customer or business outcomes does the system support? |
| Usage | Who relies on it and how important is it to their work? |
| Risk | What happens if you change, consolidate or remove it? |
| Cost | How much are you spending on licensing, maintenance, integration and support? |
Keep testing your investments
Reducing technology costs doesn’t stop with rationalising your existing estate. It also means keeping a close eye on new investments like AI tools and agents as they progress from pilot to implementation.
Even well-founded technology decisions can have a shelf life; changing requirements, rising costs or lower-than-expected ROI may alter the case for further funding.
Regular reviews will help you identify where your technologies continue to justify the investment and where funding could be put to better use.
| Review | Ask |
|---|---|
| Outcome | Is the programme still delivering the benefit we set out to achieve? |
| Cost | Has the required investment increased since approval? |
| Value | Are users saving time or gaining useful capability? |
| Capacity | Can the organisation absorb this change alongside other priorities? |
Capacity becomes even more important when you look at long-term value. Our Transformation Index found that 38% of organisations across all industries report high or very high transformation fatigue, while 74% say constant change makes it difficult to maintain momentum.₁
Asking people to drive multiple programmes at once divides their focus and makes it harder to sustain progress. It can also drain the energy teams need to respond to new opportunities.
Regularly testing the case for investment means being prepared to make the difficult decision to pause or stop a programme whose case has weakened, rather than continuing to invest because it is already under way.
How to cut tech costs without constraining your capacity to grow
Technology rationalisation can reduce costs in the short term but changing customer needs, channels and commercial priorities will continue to require investment. Start by identifying where technology complexity is consuming cost without creating corresponding business value. Then prioritise the systems, processes and dependencies that can be simplified while protecting the capabilities your business needs to grow. This gives you a clear starting point for improving operational efficiency without limiting your ability to adapt as priorities evolve.
Setting those priorities requires a joined-up view across the business. Your strategic, technology and finance leaders must make them together, weighing the expected value against what your organisation needs to deliver it. That includes the ownership, decision-making and delivery processes that determine how effectively technology can support change. Otherwise, a saving in one area can create a constraint in another.
Start with one high-value business outcome and trace what enables it across your systems, processes and data, as well as the decision rights and capacity required to deliver it. Consider where decisions, approvals and delivery processes could slow progress, even after the technology itself has been simplified. Gate One’s Transformation Index can help you benchmark that wider picture and identify where there may be opportunities to improve both growth and efficiency.
Looking at technology investment through this wider lens gives you a clearer basis for reducing costs while protecting the capabilities you’ll need in future.
Explore Gate One’s Transformation Index to see how senior leaders are approaching growth, and use the recommendations for tech leaders to sharpen your technology investment strategy.
₁IDC White Paper, sponsored by Gate One, “The Balance Advantage: How organisations crack the growth efficiency code” (IDC #EUR154681426, July 2026)
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