S03E22: Managing Localization Vendors at Scale

Wayne Bourland

Thank you. Glad to be here.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Please introduce yourself and provide some background in terms of what you do.

 

Wayne Bourland

My name is Wayne Borland. I’ve been at Dell for the past 23 years, after spending about a decade in the U.S. Army. For the past 15 years, I’ve been associated with translations in some capacity, and currently, I lead our global translation team. So I’m responsible for everything translation, internationalization, interpretation-related at Dell Technologies. My team is sort of a center of excellence for managing suppliers, pricing, turnaround time, quality, as you would expect. But we’ve been really focusing in the past couple of years on being a strategic partner, a consultant advisor, the go-to for questions related to language strategy and how to deliver, you know, to have the most impact.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You have a long tenure in the translation and localization space, and you mentioned that it’s been almost 23 years or something. Please tell us how you started and how things were back in the day when you got started.

 

Wayne Bourland

Sure. So, Dell 23 years, but translations only 15. So, I was actually in China visiting our teams there. I was part of the leadership team for the content organization that developed troubleshooting articles for support. And my boss called me and asked if I’d be interested in running the translations team. And I said, you know, sure, why not? You know, I didn’t know anything about translations other than Martin Luther had translated the Bible into German in the 1500s, and that was about my only perspective on it. So back then, you know, the team that evolved into the organization I run today, with some company and org consolidations along the way, you know, we were handling only seven languages and the annual volumes were probably less than what we do in a week today, sometimes even in a day. So much different then versus now.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And it’s been a while. So, what has stood out to you in terms of the evolution in the industry, things that have changed or shifted since you started, basically things that were game changing in a sense?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, you know, in some areas we’ve come a long way, right? But in others, you know, nothing has really changed. You know, pricing is still predominantly cost per word. You still have a lot of folks who are afraid of machine translation. You still have endless rounds and conversations about what quality is, right.

 

And on the client side, you know, all too often, we’re still the last thought when someone wants to take a product global. So that’s the stuff that hasn’t changed. But on the stuff that has, you know, MT is vastly improved. You know, AI is here, you know, it’s still not implemented as widely as we’d like it to be, but definitely at least here.

 

And people, I think another big difference, people are really starting to expand the conversation about quality, to the quality of the source content and to the outcomes of the translated content. So not just thinking about quality within the parameters of the little black box that we manage.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, let’s dive into our main topic of conversation for today. We’re going to be talking about managing localization vendors at scale, something that you do a lot basically. Let’s talk about what is localization at scale or managing vendors of localization, you know, at your scale within a blue chip enterprise of your size.

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, so, you know, you can define scale in a lot of different ways. The size of the program, you know, we translate over 30,000 jobs a year, over 400 million target words, more than a billion when you count the raw MT that we do outside of our TMS system. And we support more than 100 different stakeholders within the enterprise. When you think about it from that perspective, it’s not so much about managing each and every job. We don’t have the headcount for that. It’s really about picking the right suppliers, ensuring you have a good support team on the supplier side. That’s from the account team to the program management team all the way through to the individual program managers who really understand your business and your needs and how you operate, the tools are really able to act independently to deliver that work.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, thank you for providing that background about the big picture. Now let’s look at the basics now. What forms the basic components of localization machine inside Dell, your enterprise?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, so obviously, you’ve got TMS and all the associated tools for terminology and query management and quality management, etc. Now you’ve got an intake process. We’ve got a business development manager on my team that helps us intake new teams that we haven’t worked with in the past. Obviously, suppliers are a big piece of that. The project managers, program managers, language and quality experts, etc. on my team that really understand the stakeholder needs and set up the appropriate workflows to get the work done, that’s really, that’s really the basics. And it’s really not that much different from any large enterprise you go to.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And how big is your localization team in terms of dedicated full time people managing things?

 

Wayne Bourland

We’ve got about 50 people on my team. You know, probably roughly half of that is program managers who are working directly with our stakeholders. And we’ve got our quality team, we’ve got our data and analytics, we’ve got an MT expert, you’ve got our team managers, and the business development manager I talked about already. We’ve got finance folks that help us managing all this spend for all these different folks within the team. So yeah, about 50 with about half of them working directly on project management and the rest supporting that in some way, the tools or process.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And localization is primarily text in the sense that we are translating text, but there’s also graphics and a lot more. Is your team still predominantly working with text? Or is there’s now more multimedia type of content that you also process?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, tons of multimedia, the whole multimedia and interpretation has changed substantially since the pandemic. We only did a few interpretation jobs, and there were local with interpreters at the location in the past, now, we’re doing huge events, and mostly with remote simultaneous interpretation. So we don’t even have to have the interpreters there, you don’t have to pay for the travel and all that type of stuff. So that’s changed significantly for us, the amount of videos that we have 10s of 1000s of videos on Dell.com, and a big portion of those are translated into at least some portion of the 28 languages we support on Dell.com. So, definitely multimedia is a big part of what we do today.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

How much of the localization happens inside the enterprise or inside Dell typically, based on your experience, and what type of localization functions must be kept in house and not outsourced?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, it’s a good question. So, we don’t do any linguistic work in-house. You know, we managed to spend the pricing to turnaround time, all that stuff I mentioned earlier. We manage engagement with our internal stakeholders, we manage the suppliers, but we don’t do the language work. You know, so to that question of what must be kept in the house, I think, primarily, it’s the relationship with the internal teams that we’re supporting.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And given the sheer size of an organization like Dell, the amount of content it produces and the markets it is serving, it has to bring in outside localization vendors, which obviously you manage. Can you please tell us how an enterprise develops a criteria for selecting long term partners for localization?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, we’re actually in the middle of doing that right now we’re going through an RFP process. You know, the suppliers we have with us today have been with us for more than 10 years. So, we’ve got a really good history with them. But it’s been a long time since we ran an RFP. But you know, we’ve got a sheet of 39 criteria we’re judging suppliers on, and I’ve got a list of those, but they’re kind of in four big categories, growth, so things like innovation, automation, financial process; operations, domain level expertise, follow the sun model. We look at value, it’s another big category for us, things like pricing and account management practices. Beyond the criteria, though, if you really simplify it, you’re looking for suppliers with a scale to meet your needs, right? You may not want to be their biggest account. Industry reputation, engagement in the broader industry is something that’s really important to us. And the thing that people don’t think about is the quality of the account team or the program team. Because if your team, the folks that are doing the work every day aren’t happy with their counterparts on the supplier side, you’re going to have a lot of headaches. So that’s something we put a lot of focus on is that partnership with the supplier team.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Understood. So, speaking of managing expectations on both sides, there is sometimes a disconnect between what an enterprise like Dell has in mind in terms of solving very specific problems and what vendors see as the problem that they want to solve. What do they offer solutions that may not be relevant? Where do you see this disconnect coming from?

 

Wayne Bourland

You know, I think there could be a number of reasons, but I think it really comes down to one primary driver, which is lack of transparency. And that’s really from the client side. You know, we meet with our suppliers in annually BRs, we have QPRs, we have program meetings, we talk about what’s going on at the company, we talk about the challenges we’re facing, we ask questions. We really bring them along with what we’re trying to do. And we do it oftentimes jointly with all of our suppliers together. We really treat them like a part of our extended team. And we expect them to, you know, oftentimes work together to bring proposals to us, something that’s uncomfortable for them, something that’s fairly unique in the industry. But I think by and large, transparency, you know, if you’re not telling them what you need, if you’re not sharing with them the challenges that you’re having, and you’re not open to hearing their suggestions, then you’re never going to be aligned.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Obviously, there is time and effort involved in onboarding a new localization vendor, you’re going through an RFP right now, and you know, there are challenges of its own, given how busy your team is. With that investment, there must be plans for growing that relationship on both sides so that you can maximize the value, as you mentioned. Please share a few words on how this happens.

 

Wayne Bourland

Well, it’s getting to a little bit in the last question, we take the approach of treating them, treating our suppliers like partners, we need them to have skin in the game. And that means we must have skin in the game as well. We engage them across all levels, you know, we do joint webinars with them whether it’s at Loc World or TUAS, or other events, joint presentations, we provide references. We want to see our suppliers be successful, because we want to work with the top, you know, successful suppliers in the industry.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Speaking of which, Dell has been involved in localization for a very long time. How does it support the industry and new and up and coming suppliers? Because not all of them have the scale or they’re gigantic or big enough to take an account like Dell. Does Dell also have some sort of, you know, a mentoring program or something for these suppliers?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think that we do, you know, and it’s really interesting. Like if you attend a conference like GALA, where it’s more the smaller suppliers, it’s definitely a different perspective. Their needs are different, how they operate is sometimes different. But, you know, it’s not something we’ve really looked at in the past, something maybe to look at in the future. But today, we don’t really have any type of a mentoring system like that in place.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, scaling vendor relationships is an effort on both ends, as you mentioned, the vendor must have the desired resources, capacity and discipline, where the client must have the need and growth plans that aligns with the vendor’s interests. You just talked about that. And now, does this happen in a structured fashion? You mentioned QBRs and you look at long term plans. How often do you discuss this with your localization vendor partners?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, you know, suppliers are always asking if there’s new opportunities coming, right? You know, what’s the projection for the next year? Is it flat or is it up or is it lower? We’re at the point where we have been for some time, where work isn’t going to increase significantly, you know, more and more volumes will move to post-edited MT or MT. And, you know, we’re kind of, we have a very robust program in place today, too, with many different languages covered. So, our volumes do go up every year, but it’s not going up substantially each year because we’ve already got a pretty mature process in place. What we do try to do, though, is we try to keep them, the work roughly even, or I should say the spend with each supplier roughly even. That’s not a guarantee, but we just try as good partners to keep the spenn relatively the same between all of them so that no one gets an oversized share or as much as we can help it. And, you know, there’s obviously spikes, but we aren’t going to do anything artificial to even out those lumps, but generally try to keep it even. When we do get new opportunities, not your normal translation work, but new services or we typically give all three an opportunity to make a proposal on it. I think in a scenario where you’re growing rapidly, it’s important to be transparent with your suppliers about how you’re going to allocate work and if one is getting less, why is that? Where is their performance lacking that’s causing you to shift more work to others? That’s where that whole transparency and keeping them aware of how happy you are and how well they’re performing against the KPIs that you have in place and having those frequent conversations is really helpful for those suppliers to know what they need to do.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In terms of expectations from a vendor, you know, normally there’s the triangle that everyone has to deal with. People want translation to be cheap, fast, and the highest quality. You can’t get all of those in one package. So what’s a priority for Dell in terms of working with its vendors?

 

Wayne Bourland

Well, you know, I mean, you’re right. There is that triangle and it’s very difficult to improve one without having an impact on the other. I think part of it is taking that long-term view because they all, they all three are really important, right? In earlier times, the cost was a big driver, but that’s somewhat normalized now. We’ve got really good translation memories in place. We’ve got good MT and post-editing workflows in place, and the costs are sort of kind of leveled out about as low as they’re probably realistically going to go. So that’s not something we spend a lot of time focusing on today. We’re really focusing on turnaround time and quality, but not just, as I said earlier, not just the quality of the translations. That’s obviously very important, but what’s the quality of the source content that’s coming in and what can that tell us with AI about what type of workflows to send content down?

 

You know, a big challenge that we have with such a large enterprise is, we make these broad swath decisions about this type of work from this group. It’s this marketing type of content, it’s this category, and it’s going to go down this workflow. But the reality is you get all kinds of different types of content coming through. So the better job that we can do of making an informed decision about sending it down the right workflow allows our suppliers to be able to deliver, you know, to the expectations, the appropriate expectations, right? So a big focus for us is get the right quality, but do it by making sure that you’re arming the suppliers with the right context. You’re sending things down the right workflows. You’ve got an understanding of what your source content quality looks like and what your end goal expectations are.

 

And then on the turnaround time front, everyone’s always wanting it faster because usually it’s, you know, we’re the last thing in the chain to getting this out the door and they’re already way behind. So I think building those relationships with those stakeholder groups so that they understand, you know, if you want quality deliverables, you’ve got to give us the needed amount of time to turn around for you. Sure, we can turn around quicker, but we can’t guarantee you you’re going to get the quality that you’re looking for. So really it’s that transparency also with your internal stakeholders about what your capabilities are.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Speaking of technology, you mentioned that you’re implementing AI in terms of machine translation and getting, executing the translation itself. But what about the process of acquiring the translation? So for instance, the project management and categorizing the type of text, are those things in place right now, or do you think that AI has a role to play?

 

Wayne Bourland

I think AI has a big role to play because like I said earlier, we’re making these broad swath decisions about this type of work from this, this stakeholder needs this type of quality or this type of turnaround, or whatever the case may be. But as I said, we do over 30,000 projects a year. You can’t have, you know, we need a project management team 10 times the size we have todayif you really want to look at each piece of source content and say, well, yeah, that does look like marketing. It does look like it should go down this type of a workflow. You know, let’s do some, let’s look at, is there a new terminology in here that we haven’t seen before? All those types of things that it would be great to do. You simply don’t have time to do it, neither do the suppliers before they, before they pass it on to, to the freelancers.

 

But with an AI system, an AI system can look at every single piece of source. It can run linguistic analysis. It can understand whether it’s got short sentences or long sentences, got, you know, complex noun clusters or it’s relatively simple sentences. And it can then make smart decisions about this type of work should go down a, you know, what we call a category four or marketing workflow, or this is really simple text and it’s mostly technical. So, you know what, you can put it down a category three, which is more PEMT, right? And then you can infuse, which we haven’t done yet. We haven’t done the source analytics yet either, just to be completely honest, but we have plans to, but you can also then implement AI within the workflow that looks at the content after it’s translated and says, you know what, this looks really good. We can skip post editing or based on analysis; we know that likely this set of segments wouldn’t get very much post editing. So, we’ll pass those through and just pass on the ones that we know probably need some post editing to our translator.

 

So, there’s a lot of things that we’re going to be able to do with AI that’s going to help us, focus the translator on just what needs the work, right? And then we’re only paying for what needs the work versus today, it’s really sort of a scattershot. You’re going to pay for the work regardless of whether this segment needs a little bit of editing or a whole bunch of editing, right? So, I think getting smarter about how we leverage AI to really help us make good decisions about the workflows is the next big step for us and for the industry.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

I agree with you Wayne on that one, but let’s talk back again about how you work with vendors and how you set expectations. Now we can take a look at growth. Every organization has a different view of localization, but what does a typical growth rate for localization vendor looks like in Dell when dealing with a technology enterprise you know, of your size?

 

Wayne Bourland

Well, you know, as I said, you were rather mature at this point, right? But I can tell you over the past seven years, spend has roughly increased except for early in the pandemic, right? That’s roughly increased at about 5% per year. And volumes have increased at about 10% per year, right? So, it tells you a little bit about, you know, we’re doing more PEMT and other things where our volume is increasing at a higher rate than our spend, but spend is still going up and cost per word has decreased by greater than 10% over the last, well, really the last five years, the last couple of years or over the last seven years, but within the last couple of years, it’s really sort of leveled out.

 

As I said earlier, we really can’t push cost per word down much lower. So, I think for a big enterprise that is, we’re not a start-up, right? And we’re not in a start-up mode where you would see, you know, this really, you know, logarithmic growth of volumes. For us, you know, the volumes are coming in. We’re trying to leverage our dollars to cover more languages. We want to cover, go deeper into the content that we have, the source content that we’re creating, because we all know we only translate a small portion of all the content that we ever create, right? So that growth rate is going to be smaller for a large company like ours.

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Sultan Ghaznawi

In many ways, enterprises invest in their vendors so they can build capacity in advance. We talked about mentorship earlier, but this is investing in terms of building that capacity. Please share some background on how can vendors maximize the value of that investment as ROI for enterprises?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, you know, it’s an interesting question. All of our suppliers are in the top 10 from a revenue perspective. So, we’re not investing in them to grow capacity, you know, per se. They don’t need that. But we do invest in them. You know, we’re quite unique in the industry in how we partner with our suppliers. You know, as I said earlier, they’re competitors, but we treat them as part of the Dell Extended team. We put them in a lot of situations where they have to work together to bring innovation or insight to us. You know, we hold annual EBRs where we’re bringing them all together. We share results of vendor surveys. So, we do surveys on each one of them, and they do a survey on themselves. And we compare the results. But we also do a survey on us, and they do a survey on us. So, they can tell us where we’re not performing as well as we could be, right? Because, you know, there are things, if there are things that we can do better that helps them do their work better, then we want to know that, right?

 

We even go as far as, you know, we give them a trophy. We give an award out for the supplier of the year. We give awards out for individual contributors who’ve had the most impact. You know, and it’s just a trophy. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, but it really has a lot of meaning for them. That’s something they take quite a bit of pride in. We do joint quality QBRs where we openly share information about how each supplier is doing from a quality standpoint. They know where they stand against their peers, you know, on performance. Obviously, we don’t share anything cost-related. That wouldn’t be appropriate. But everywhere that we’re able to share information, we do it, you know, across everyone.

 

And you know, something else that’s really interesting for the past couple of years, we’ve ran a translation summit where we compensate the translators, a portion of the translators, right? I mean, we probably leverage some 4,000 translators in any given year. But we compensate a portion of those translators from each supplier so that they can spend four hours with us instead of, you know, so we spend our time instead of translating, but talking about our products, our processes, getting their input on what they would, what would make their work and lives easier.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

And then how do you forecast what the next 12 or 24 months will look like in terms of volume so you can build that skill and capacity on the vendor side? Do you have a pipeline visibility? Do you have interactions with other departments who tell you what to expect?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, so the first thing I’d say is, you know, we work with big suppliers, we would expect them to have, you know, capacity at hand, right? But we also know it’s not quite that simple. And this is a question my boss asks quite a bit, why can’t we forecast better? You know, frankly, we’re quite bad at it. You know, and I talked to lots of different people in my role at different companies, and I don’t think any client is really that great at forecasting, not nearly as good as our suppliers would want us to be. But that said, we use historical data, we use our relationships with our stakeholders and our understanding about what may be going on in the product cycles to give rough guidance. But we don’t do nearly as good a job as I think our suppliers would like us to do on, okay, how many jobs are we going to expect next week? And to what languages? What type of content? There’s just too much going on, moving way too fast, and things change, you know, very quickly. So, I think that level of forecasting is a real challenge for us.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wayne you mentioned earlier that one of the criteria for selecting a new vendor is in terms of their innovation and how much they’ve invested in technology and how ahead of the curve they are. So, technology is key and every localization vendor must invest in the right technology to stay relevant and respond to customers or Dell’s evolving needs. So how do you see vendor technology as an enabler of growth for your side of the localization business?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, technology is one of those topics like quality, we could, you know, we could talk about it all day long, right? But really, just to keep it simple, I want two things out of the industry on the technology front. I want investment in AI. So I don’t mean MT, but I mean the things like source scanning and risk assessment and QA, quality assessment models, those type of things.

 

And the other thing is, I’m really not interested in technology lock-in. You may have a fantastic technology that will help to reduce costs and improve quality. But if I can’t leverage it across my entire vendor pool, then it’s really of no value to me. So really focusing, I want the industry to really focus on, you know, tools that can be leveraged across multiple suppliers, right? So that’s my two big ones, AI and technology that’s leverageable across your entire portfolio of suppliers.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Given that Dell is a technology firm of its own, and obviously you’ve invested in a lot in technology in terms of helping you with your process, do you expect your vendors to use that technology and somehow develop compatibility with it?

 

Wayne Bourland

We are a large technology company, but we don’t do a ton of software development. And that carries through to what we do within the translation organization. We use, you know, say off-the-shelf technologies. We don’t really do any development, maybe some development of some API connectors when we need to. But even that we try to get from our supplier as much as possible. So, you know, for us, we’re not developing the technology. We’re really using industry standard technology. And you know, by and large, most suppliers are pretty comfortable and are used to using those technologies.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

So, speaking of technology and capacity, let’s talk about localization relationship model. Traditionally large LSPs with multi-region presence and armies of project managers and account managers had the advantage of doing business with large technology enterprises like Dell. Do you see that changing in the light of things happening virtually and, you know, leveraging technology such as APIs to pass content back and forth? How is that model changing?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, I think it depends on a number of factors, right? So, to be clear, I think there are a lot of great LSPs out there that are in the $1 million and $10 million range. And the same for the $10 million to $50 million range, you know, annual revenue. And I know a lot of my peers that prefer to work with those smaller LSPs. They feel like they have more control over direction. They get a lot of attention from all levels of the company. So certainly, you know, people see value in that.

 

And one thing I would also say is none of the companies we’re working with is because they leverage their sales department to bombard us, right? We establish our relationships through industry recommendations, reputation. I personally hate cold calls. You know, I know the industry well enough that, you know, if I want to do business with you, I’ll come find you. But for us, you know, we have a, we made a strategic decision to work with a small number of very large LSPs. And for a couple of reasons.

 

One, they typically will have the breadth of services that we may need to cover so we don’t have to go find a niche provider. If we say, oh, all of a sudden, we now need to do RSI or remote simultaneous interpretation, we need to go find these other folks. Either our suppliers will have that capability or they’ll already have a network of partners that they work with to provide that for us.

 

They have burst capacity to deal with, you know, our poor forecasting that I talked about earlier. And if you had to quickly move away from one supplier, you know, the suppliers we work with are large enough that they could pick up that slack very quickly without our stakeholders feeling the impact. And I think that’s something that a smaller supplier would struggle with.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

To continue or a follow up on that question, do you prefer working with LSPs that specialize in a specific type of content or language, or would you rather prefer to work with a one-stop shop that does everything for you?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, it’s a later for us. We don’t have any true niche needs. You know, most of it is standard marketing translation or standard text, you know, product doc translation, you know, those type of things. So, you know, with over 30,000 jobs a year, you know, the vast majority of those are delivered in two to three days. We really don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, which supplier this is going to go to, right, based on the supplier has this capability or that capability, or they’ve got, you know, the ability to take on this much work or that much work. It’s much easier for us just to have, you know, three large partners that can do anything that we need them to do at any scale that we need them to do it at. And just, you know, predefined where that work’s going and not have to worry about it.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

You mentioned QBRs earlier and vendor touch points. How important is it for an enterprise like Dell to meet regularly with its vendors and discuss how to scale up the relationship? Are vendors investing in learning about what keeps enterprise localization managers awake at night, like the actual core problems you have to deal with?

 

Wayne Bourland

Yeah, you know, I’d say it’s extremely important. As I said earlier, transparency is key. You know, we have the EBRs, the QBRs, the joint quality QBRs. You know, I meet with the account team on a monthly basis, my VP meets with senior leaders quarterly at each supplier, my PMs and leadership team meet with their counterparts on a monthly basis. And that’s not the count, you know, all the separate meetings that go on around a particular initiative, right? So, there’s ample opportunity at all levels of the supplier to talk with us, to understand, you know, what we need, for us to understand, you know, what maybe their capabilities that they have to bring to the table. So yeah, I would say they’re invested, you know, they have to be. Our suppliers will tell you that they love working with us, but they’ll also tell you it’s not a cakewalk. You know, we’re very demanding, but we’re also just demanding of ourselves. You know, as I said earlier, we complete those surveys and we survey on our own performance as well. And we ask them for feedback. We want them to tell us, you know, what we could be doing better.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wayne, please describe how do you map scaling of localization vendor relationships into your enterprise’s localization KPIs? I mean, you do have certain metrics to hit, right? How do you measure that performance?

Wayne Bourland

Well, yeah, we do. We obviously, we measure turnaround time and that’s available for our suppliers to access at any time. We measure, we use MQM or, you know, DQF, the dynamic quality framework to measure quality. We do that through scorecards. We obviously keep a really close track on cost per word, but we’re also, you know, and we talked about the surveys that we did earlier on a relationship level, but we also are really starting to spend more time delving into things like edit distance, on, you know, translator productivity, things that have an impact on, you know, our ability to turn things around, you know, quickly and with good quality.

 

So that’s where we’re spending more of our time now. We’ve got those basic metrics in place, but looking at these deeper analytics, but, and then also looking at what we’re doing, the outcomes of the translations we’re doing to KPI. So, to give you an example, if you take a website, you take a US page on the website in English and you look at click-through rates, and then we want to, we’d want to be able to compare the click-through rates on the same page for German or Japanese or whatever the case may be and is it similar? And if it’s similar, that’s great. We’re probably doing a pretty good job of translating it in a way that needs to be translated so that we get the same outcome on the customer end, right? But if it’s lower than we would expect, then, you know, we’re building lots of data through the AI that I talked about earlier to figure out where the problem is. Is the problem with our translation or is the problem with the source content wasn’t very clear or wasn’t appropriate for the market or if the problem sits somewhere else? So again, really thinking outside of just the traditional translation metrics and focusing on source and outcomes.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Wayne, how do you see the future of localization vendor relationship for technology enterprises such as Dell? Where is it headed to?

 

Wayne Bourland

I think relationships and that transparency will become more and more important. Skin in the game on both sides. AI will be critical, joint innovation, working together to understand where we can get the most efficiency, provide the best outcomes for our end customers. So, relationships are key to that. And as technology starts doing more and more of the work and it’s more of a technology first and human optimized, that interaction and that relationship we have with our suppliers and our ability to understand what’s taking place in the machine, so to speak, and be able to tune in that, it’s going to become more and more important.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

In closing, what are your thoughts and advice for LSP executives? How can they do better to make sure that Dell and clients like that all meet their objectives better?

 

Wayne Bourland

I cringe when an LSP approaches me and tries to tell me that they’re different. You may call your services something different, you may market yourself differently, but at the end of the day, LSPs are doing the same thing. They’re providing translation services, they do it in typically the same way. But instead, what I’m interested in is focus on innovation, focus on how you partner with your customers and how you bring the right skill sets and account and PM teams to the relationship. Tell me about how you’re investing in the industry. Tell me about how you’re investing in the translators, the people that are really doing the work. That’s the kind of stuff that I value. So, I think if LSPs and their relationship with their clients or their prospective clients are really focusing on innovation, on relationships, on what we can do together to better the industry and better the industry for those that work within it, I think that’s where the real value is.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Well, that was a great discussion and it gave us all a glimpse inside LSP and vendor management teams from an enterprise perspective. I did learn quite a bit and I’m hoping that our community and colleagues all had something to learn from this. With that, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights.

 

Wayne Bourland

Great, thank you. Really enjoyed it.

 

Sultan Ghaznawi

Localization in large enterprises is much different from managing a small translation unit in a start-up. Scaling localization to meet the demands of growing amount of content and different streams such as marketing, engineering, human resources, internal comms and more is daunting and requires a disciplined mindset. As we heard, it makes sense for enterprises to review their localization vendor management strategy every few years and onboard new vendors that have the scale, experience and technology to execute localization projects of enterprise in nature. As Wayne pointed out, it is equally important for localization vendors to have a sense of collaboration and teamwork to not just execute the project in concert with the client, but to also complement other localization vendors as part of the client’s business process outsourcing mechanism. For mega MLVs, it is always going to be challenging and rewarding to manage such accounts and it will go a long way to invest in the right people, technology and process for the long term.

 

And that is a wrap for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any comments or ideas. My goal from this podcast is to be educated and share that education with the translation and localization community. If I have been able to help you learn at least one thing today, then my goal is met. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Translation Company Talk Podcast on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify or your platform of choice and give us a 5-star rating for this episode.

 

Until next time.

 

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