Unblocking Technica’s project management bottlenecks with automation technology

About Technica Translations

Technica Translations is a provider of written translations and related services from English, German and French into Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Russian. Among its main customers are other language services providers (LSPs) and global enterprises.

Project Challenges

A big portion of Technica’s business comes from subcontracting translation and localization into Baltic languages (Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian) for numerous translation companies. Technica stats from 2020:

CUSTOMERS
75
TRANSLATION PROJECTS
6990

New trends in the content creation cycle, especially in the software industry, are changing the way language service providers like Technica deal with translation work. The actual work process has become more fragmented than ever, and it is now common for project managers at Technica to look at 30 new projects every day in their inboxes. Most industries are heavily intertwined with the IT sector and have adopted their agile development practices. Projects are split into tiny bite-sized chunks and are expected to be completed asap. This means tight turnaround times with no concessions on quality, and this creates new challenges for the translation industry. 

Problem

Not surprisingly, the number of translation jobs coming in led to project management bottlenecks: Technica’s customers were impatiently waiting for confirmation, but they didn’t know that processing the projects and entering them into the translation management system could take hours. Technica needed to find a smarter way to deal with this new situation.

Finding a solution

Like many other language service providers, Technica uses XTRF as its translation management system. After discussing with their project managers, they came to the conclusion that one of the main productivity killers was getting the client project’s information and files into their XTRF. 

They tried a few different ways of doing this. This included integrating their emails into the XTRF workflow and writing a script that would pull the information from their customers’ systems into their own, but they quickly realized this was not feasible for a company of their size. In the end, and after having considering multiple alternatives, they decided to try the BeLazy platform on their own.

Automation requires not only the right
technology but professional expertise

The Technica team decided to try the BeLazy platform on their own. They signed up and added quickly all their customers, presuming to watch the magic happen on its own. But it didn’t work as they expected it. Here is a shortlist of the challenges they had to sort:

Working with BeLazy

The above-mentioned issues show the kind of challenges the Technica team had to sort out in order to see the benefits of the automated translation process. Fortunately, they weren’t alone in such a daunting task. BeLazy was right by their team’s side helping them to figure out the best solution to each problem.

Results

Technica has managed to decrease the average project set up to just 1 minute. This means that their project managers need just 1 minute to get all the instructions, financial details, files, deadlines, and other data from the customer’s TMS into Technica’s XTRF.

The Technica team is now extremely positive about automating processes. As a matter of fact, they are ready to keep going and investing in solutions that make their business process more cost-effective.

It can still be improved of course but is also a success already – when you have 30 tasks waiting in your inbox in the morning and 30 minutes later they are all confirmed and imported to your system, this is already a huge improvement from what we faced a year ago. We are clearly moving towards delegating repetitive tasks to the robots and our PMs can dedicate more time to the more humane and value-adding tasks of communicating with the linguists and the customers.
Tanel Karus
Technica Translations