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Technolex belongs to a small group of LSPs that not only serves the IT sector but is technology-intensive itself. The company’s toolset includes Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, XTM, Smartcat, and also Across. Even more, in their early stages, they were the masterminds behind the development of a business management system called Protemos, which then received private investment and now it is a fully separated company headquartered in the USA (Technoloex continues to use it as its BMS).
Still, even for a company with in-house development expertise, automating translation workflows hasn’t been super straightforward. The number of small translation projects (those with less than 300 words) increases year after year and this posed challenges to their project management team.
The growing number of small translation jobs meant that every project manager in their team spent a decent amount of working hours on tedious copy-pasting. They were increasingly afraid of potential bottlenecks that could create delays in their turnaround times, so they started to look for a solution for this problem.
At first, they studied the idea of creating a script to automate the process but had trouble coming up with a solution that was able to keep up with constant changes in rules for accepting projects, places where the files need to be stored, or user credentials. They realized that integrating systems was not as easy as they had expected so they reached out to BeLazy.
According to Vladislav, Technolex’s Production Manager, automating translation workflows together with BeLazy was not particularly difficult. They identified a quick win for projects offered by Lionbridge, so we designed a process that relies on auto-approval rules and automatically accepts jobs from Lionbridge LCX when they meet certain criteria. Once accepted, the translation jobs are then automatically created in their BMS, Protemos, ultimately allowing Technolex to efficiently outsource projects for translation. Finally, the automation supports the delivery of the translated files, without having to log in to customer portals.
More often than not, when we hear stories of automation, the narrative tends to overemphasize the simple parts, the exponential benefits — almost like fairy tales. The truth is behind the scenes everything is more complicated and achieving a perfectly polished workflow requires a lot of trial and error. In the case of Technolex these were some of the challenges we had to sort along the road:
Some of these obstacles were sorted during the first implementation phases while others are being actively addressed by both teams to develop fixes as fast as possible.
Given the success of the first implementation, Technolex has decided to further invest in workflow automation. Today they automatically receive from and deliver projects to 12 different vendor portals, including several XTRF and Plunet portals. The challenges they had to overcome have been fundamental to understanding that automation requires strategy, technology, and expertise — It’s not just pressing a button. Still, the growing benefits keep their motivation high and their minds busy thinking of future plans and new automated workflows for other systems such as Wordbee.
The project managers’ feedback on BeLazy has also helped them to understand what other features were required from their business management system (Protemos) in order to enable no-touch workflows in the future. It’s through this constant feedback that the two systems keep evolving and finding better ways to work together while removing unnecessary overlaps.
Technolex started using BeLazy in November 2020. In just two months, 268 projects were processed by BeLazy in 2020. Already in January 2021, 15.5% of all projects were processed in BeLazy and the company has seen an overall increase in project managers’ ability to plan, track and execute their tasks. Certainly, BeLazy has simplified their job.