The amazing value of process automation
The success of any translation project depends on the efficiency of its processes and established workflows. While there are no universal workflows that can be replicated across different industries and types of projects, there are proven practices and tech solutions you can rely on to optimize them.
Over the past decade, Ciklopea has grown from a startup to an industry leader thanks to continuous investment into three key elements: people, processes, and technology. From the very start, the team has gathered professionals with great project management and linguistic expertise, which is why we were able to identify major bottlenecks in the way translation projects were handled.
One of our mottos is to automate as much as we can so that people can work to the best of their abilities. Mundane, manual tasks can be automated by using the right tech solution, which leaves more time for team members to focus on meaningful tasks.
The contribution of humans is irreplaceable in many areas, so it makes no sense to make them waste their energy and effort on monkey tasks. Not only is this inefficient, but it can also have a negative impact on the productivity and motivation of team members.
Replacing humans where it makes sense
Let’s look at an example of QA processes to better understand the value of automating certain tasks. At Ciklopea, we implement specific Translation Quality Assurance programs that ensure clients’ multilingual communication is top-notch. Our QA process includes:
- Linguistic, in-country, and in-context reviews
- Checking accuracy, precision, style, and fluency
- A reliance on the 6-eye principle, meaning that at least three different linguists/experts have checked the translated content
Needless to say, quality assurance needs to be carried out by real human experts. Sure, there are automated QA tools, but for more nuanced quality checks that include evaluating the tone of voice, sentiment, or jargon, there has to be an expert involved. But there are a lot of other things you can take off their plates. The key is identifying what parts of the process can be automated.
For instance, there is no need to manually upload files and project data to another TMS or BMS if a database such as Memsource, MemoQ, or BeLazy already exists. It is also unproductive to try to navigate the translation project in a counterintuitive program that was originally built for other purposes (e.g. Excel or spreadsheets).
Little by little, we recognized that it was time to invest in a homegrown workflow system. Finally, in 2016, we built Orchestrum to ensure better efficiency, consistency, and smooth management of multilingual content.
The difference Orchestrum makes
The most recent update of Orchestrum included integration with a cloud-based CAT platform. This allowed us to delegate approximately 85% of the administrative and repetitive project-related tasks to Orchestrum. This has made a huge impact on our efficiency in the following ways:
- Thanks to automation, we freed our project managers from a considerable amount of repetitive work
- Our project managers gained more time to focus on other aspects of their job (e.g. ensuring optimal team productivity, quality control, a healthy project pace)
The main benefit of having a homegrown workflow system is that you can control how the tool evolves over time. This isn’t the case with other software solutions where although you can share your user feedback with the company’s customer success team, the desired product feature might not be available for months (or at all).
Ciklopea’s team has been collaborating with external developers to ensure Orchestrum fully satisfies our everyday needs. We continuously upgrade it multiple times per year to ensure the tool truly serves both us and our clients. It is quite flexible in its nature, which means we can adjust it well to our different teams’ preferred methods of working.
There are quite a few automation options available in Orchestrum:
- Integrations between clients’ TMS tools and Orchestrum, which allow for the automatic creation of projects
- Integrations that allow us to pull data from CAT tools such as Memsource, which allow us to automatically create projects in Orchestrum based on that data
- Clients can fill out a vendor recruitment form and Orchestrum will automatically create vendor candidate profiles (this allows for the creation of text projects for vendor candidates directly through Orchestrum)
As you can see, Orchestrum allows multiple LSP processes to be contained within a single system. It has different modules that can be used for project management, client management, vendor management, HR management, accounting, etc.
Instead of having key project data scattered across multiple software, Orchestrum helps you get a good overview of everything that’s going on.
Additionally, Orchestrum has a BI reporting module available. This helps us generate reports and data, and predict yearly trends. As such, it’s a powerful platform that centralizes key data in a single place.
We also plan to integrate the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) soon, which will be available with just a few clicks.
Integrations are the key to automating more (especially for smaller and recurring translation tasks)
Ciklopea was always interested in increasing the efficiency of its processes, which is why we were looking for complementary solutions to Orchestrum. Developing system integrations from scratch isn’t always the best path to take, especially considering the costs. Additionally, we believed that there are existing solutions on the market that can help us work more efficiently.
In 2020, we reached an agreement with BeLazy, and after two months of our tech teams collaborating together, an integration was launched. This helped us increase interoperability without having to develop further integrations in the future. This made Orchestrum more functional and allowed for more automation.
This was a huge win for us because we were looking for a way to automate small and recurring translation tasks coming from our client’s TMS or BMS tools into Orchestrum.
Within just the first two months of deploying BeLazy, we noticed a 20% decrease in project administration time. Since then, we have gradually increased the use of BeLazy in Orchestrum and reached a point where between 400 and 500 projects get processed every month. That accounts for 130,000 words of small, repeating jobs.
Looking at our latest measurements, one project manager needs only 36 seconds to manage a project in the system, without QA checks.
Everybody benefits from process automation
Orchestrum is used by all Ciklopea’s employees. This includes project managers, the sales team, the linguistic team, the QA team, and various types of support teams such as accounting and technical support. It is used by all Ciklopea’s vendors as well. Our direct clients also have the option to open their profile and check their quotes, orders, and invoices.
There are many stakeholders involved in the translation ecosystem. We can guarantee that not a single one of them would ever say they prefer to handle repetitive and boring tasks manually. It is a waste of energy and resources.
We invite you to identify the most annoying bottlenecks in your translation workflow and reach out to us for a consultation. Of course, if you need assistance with localization or translation, we’ll be more than happy to help.