SaaS Consolidation: From Three Overlapping Tools to One Committee-Ready Memo

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It's 9:15 on a Monday morning. The CFO has scrawled two words across the top of last week's IT governance review deck: "Fix this." The circled number beneath: $326,520 — annual spend on three workflow platforms that do roughly the same thing. Operations bought one. Marketing bought another. Engineering bought a third. Nobody asked if the other two existed.

You open the license inventory report. Three tools. Six hundred sixty-five seats. Only 430 people actually use them. A hundred and fifty-eight licenses generating invoices for nothing. Your boss wants a business-case memo on the operations review committee's agenda in two weeks — projected savings, migration costs, risk analysis, and a recommendation they can approve in a 30-minute slot.

You could open Excel, pull up all three contracts, cross-reference the IT architecture team's migration estimates, and manually build a comparison. That's a solid two-day job if you don't make a mistake in the cell references. Or you brief an AI to do the analysis — and the difference between a useful memo and a thin one comes down to three moves:

1. The feed — extract the full decision frame from the documents and put it in front of the AI, so it answers the real question instead of a narrower one.
2. The report — convert the AI's raw numbers into a one-page brief a CFO can approve in a committee slot.
3. The cross-check — run the brief on at least a second platform and locate the one number they disagree on, so you know what finance still has to verify.

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