The future demanded a new technological solution. Development of the Global Technology Platform at Janus Worldwide:

About a third of LSPs prefer to develop their own business automation systems rather than buy an off-the-shelf solution and Janus Worldwide is one of them, having invested money, resources and about five years to develop its Global Technology Platform (GTP) for interacting with clients. By the end of 2020, more than a quarter of the company’s clients had migrated to the new system. Natalya Rudinskaya, Key Account Director at Janus Worldwide, shares her vision of translation automation solutions and discusses the intent behind the creation of Janus’s Global Technology Platform.

The GTP concept was born in 2017. Back then, some translations were done in Word, Trados 2007 was still in use, and some tables continued to be maintained in Excel, despite the availability of the ERP. Implementing change was a slow process. Project assistants carried out similar types of task, but we always believed that many repetitive jobs could be done by machine, for example calculating total costs or balancing a client’s budget over a month. We then discussed automating the calculation of quotes and made this functionality available to project managers in our ERP, but they still had to send the quotes to clients by email. These emails would be lost, or clients would reply in the wrong thread, miss the deadlines specified in the quote and then demand that work be handed over much earlier than planned… So we realized we needed to make it possible for clients to drop a file somewhere, obtain an estimate of costs and deadlines, and then—if everything was satisfactory—confirm that work could start.

It was vital to give clients an easy way to find the project they needed and track progress. This would mean that they’d no longer have to ask, “Is the translation ready? Will the deadline be met, because it’s an extremely important project?” We therefore wanted to bring all the necessary functionality together on a single platform, and in fact we already had the blueprints for this in the ERP we had developed seven years earlier.

There was no question of buying a ready-made solution, because we had extensive practical experience and an in-house ERP tool tailored to our processes. Why pay for something that you already have? And we didn’t want to spend extra time and effort explaining the intricacies of working on localization projects to third-party developers. We are all used to using platforms, even at home, for example, when we order food.

For translations, platforms are even more critical. Management tasks become complex and clients eventually come looking for a platform solution. Typically, these clients:

– are a translation department or translation coordinator at a large enterprise with a high volume of translation work;
– work with several translators and vendors, and order a range of services in addition to translation, such as DTP;
– and importantly, they prepare translation cost reports for their management.

Of course, it wasn’t all smooth sailing immediately. When we first started development, we suddenly realized—although this now seems somewhat superficial—that clients needed a clearer, simpler interface, so we started redesigning it. But then some of our early-adopter clients, who were already used to the first version, encountered difficulties when we switched to the new one: settings disappeared, extended access rights wouldn’t connect, old projects wouldn’t open, and our own managers saw empty orders displayed in the system… We had to quickly assemble a working group to fine-tune the support process for managers and clients. We currently use a single window format, with just one username and password, providing access to management and monitoring of the translation process at the same time. A further upgrade that we suggest is installing the system on the client’s server, along with a connection to our ERP. This offers clients greater accountability, or access to a database of translators with ratings and quality tracking. But that’s a story for another day.