XTRF Team

The notion of agile process management has been around for at least fifteen years now, and seems to gain traction just currently in the translation and localization businesses. Usually associated with software development, some of its valuable insights can also be applied to the language industry. The agile movement was…

Vendor management can be regarded as one of the most important tasks of a translation agency. After all, the core of the business resides in the effective reselling of the work of your vendors, as a result, any inefficiencies in managing them must have a direct impact on your bottom line and your results.

We’ve already mentioned a number of factors that can have a strong impact on your costs and the ways on how to reduce the amount of money that flows out of your business. Now it’s time to discuss how we can bring more money into the business. In the previous installment, we identified the elements directly impacting your margins. The revenue that you get for your service is spent on covering your internal and external costs.

“You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure” The quote above from Edwards Deming sets the tone to this three-part report dedicated to the challenges of running a profitable translation business in today’s markets. And these challenges are numerous: language service providers have started competing globally while customers’ demand for services has grown without their budgets the following suit.

We’re used to the fact that Business Applications are harder to use, than websites and applications that you would use in your private live. Things that aren’t acceptable in sites and applications that we use recreationally are things that we have to endure at work. This however doesn’t have to…

In the previous instalments of my blog, I advocated the role of process automation for the sake of effort reduction. Now I’d like to address another one of its advantages – standardization. When submitting a proposal in response to an important Request for Quotation, every extra advantage that can be…