Start with ownership, not a product category. The groups that climb out of sprawl follow the same sequence, even when their footprints look different.
Discover — find every vendor supporting every location. That means corporate and franchisee procurement, not just the contracts IT remembers. Include alarm monitoring, POTS lines still billing quietly, and the MSP relationship someone inherited.
Inventory — document vendor, category, contract, renewal date, escalation contact, and whether corporate or the franchisee procured it. If a store manager cannot find the list during an incident, the inventory is not finished.
Standardize — set an approved vendor list by category once the inventory is honest. That is a governance decision about who you will do business with, not yet a blueprint for how each store is built.
Govern — assign a named owner for each category, review the list on a regular cadence, and track exceptions so they do not become the default. Governance is an operating discipline, not a one-time cleanup project.
After governance is clear, the next decision is what those vendors should deploy — the repeatable store blueprint for network, POS, Wi‑Fi, and security. That is technology standardization work, not vendor sprawl work.
