Why an audit?

Taking a step back in your organization to assess your strategic needs for the future is not a bad idea in this economy. Everyone is looking for efficiencies that will help reduce expenses and increase profits down the line.

How would a Global Communication Readiness Assessment fit into your strategic planning? Most of you may have a strategic plan, but how many of you have effective global communications as a line item on that strategic plan? Our experience is that global communication often resides on the day-to-day operational level. Efficiencies are usually only addressed on project level and learning and growth is often siloed from other departments.

This is understandable; there are many strategic and tactical or operational challenges that an organization has to deal with. Time is a valuable asset of an organization and you want to spend it wisely. The volume of your global communications may not be large enough to justify spending a lot of managerial time to optimize every global communication process, perhaps just not yet!

Clients of ours using the assessment have noted that they can do this at their own pace, pass it around to others in the organization to compare, bring it with them to the next strategy meeting to bring awareness to potential "gaps", and elevate their own position with ideas on how they can go forward.

Realizing that there are restrictions to the time your organization has available is all the more reason to take this assessment and look at the areas that of improvement that will benefit you most. The assessment provides insightful questions on both operational and strategic levels that can be addressed. The most important aspect of this assessment is to get the communication process on the agenda for improvement. You want to be ready to scale up for the future!

The assessment can work on any level of the organization and the questions are organized to be scalable to any stage of maturation. Even on a project level or departmental level, the assessment can provide insight into your writing, designing and file management process that has an impact on the translation and localization process that follows.

Every little progress helps. Meet with Language Solutions to talk about your needs to get started and take control over your global communication process so that you can depend on it now and in the future.

A Baldrige Focused LSP in a World of ISO 9001

ISO 9001 certification is the norm right now for LSPs (Language Service Providers) in the Localization Industry. As a company that follows Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, we're swimming against the tide of conformity. I do not believe that their should be an either/or approach in determination of the certification you choose and I view ISO 9001 and Six Sigma as tools that all fit in the toolbox for continuous improvement.

With Baldrige, there is a focus on performance excellence for the entire organization in an overall management framework and the Criteria focuses on identification and tracking of all-important organizational results: customer, product/service, financial, human resource, and organizational effectiveness. This year, I became a certified Examiner for the MQA Award with the State of Missouri and each employee will also go through this certification for their own professional growth next year. It's been an exhilarating experience!



Whereas ISO can lay the foundation for necessary procedural standardization and help to reduce variability, Baldrige can be used as a means of instituting broader quality management and provide the tools for analysis, prioritization and evaluation of the overall approach. Each are different but certainly can be compatible. We chose Baldrige for the educational approach which is an organizational value that is inherent in our organization and in our approach with client mentorship.

I will be focusing future blog posts on how Baldrige helps our own internal processes and compliments our process measurement system for clients managing translation.

Translation Management Strategy

Does your organization have a translation management strategy? Many organizations rely on their LSP (Language Service Provider) to effectively manage their translation projects. However, there is only so much efficiency that can be managed on the LSP side. Are people within your organization aware of how they impact the overall costs? Does your LSP make this visible to you and mentor you to achieve efficiencies in your own processes so that you can not only affect your costs but also the quality of your communications? Would your organization take advantage of this if it were available?

Many organizations that we work with are in the 80th percentile of companies on the GCMM. Many of these organizations won't realize the value of efficiencies until they are in the High Risk stage of which overspending is a common symptom. It is the overspending that causes them to finally understand the pain and consider the value of efficiencies. At this point though, organizations cannot go back and change what has happened to get them to this point.

Our approach is to be proactive early on and help mentor organizations throughout their stages of maturity. However, we have found that until an organization experiences the "pain" associated with the High Risk stage, it is very difficult to get them to be proactive early on. So what causes you to take that proactive stance in your organization? Perhaps it is an opportunity to bring a new strategy to upper management. Perhaps it is an opportunity to be able to defend the budget that you are asking for....

At LSI, we have metrics defined in 4 areas that we assess for a client's own translation management strategy. It is not necessary for a client to implement all the metrics in the 4 areas that we assess but rather focus on the 1 area in which they can gain success. Each area has 4-6 metrics with an action plan for continuous improvement and for measurement. If your organization has a quality management system, we can help you to interpret that data as well that you are already tracking and add our metrics to yours. It might be a strategy for the new year that you can implement!

Do you risk losing control of your brand?

We have mentioned in earlier posts that the decision to centralize control over your messaging will impact your brand identity. Centralization of brand messaging is the first step in creating a consistent brand identity. When it comes to multilingual communications however, some organizations rely on local experts to market and sell their products. These type of organizations must find a balance between ownership of their messaging at the corporate level to protect their brand identity and allowing for customization of their communications by local experts such as their in-country distributors.

Our spotlight is on the profile of a company that is emerging in several foreign markets at the same time. This company is using local distributors to market and sell their products in-country. Until this year, they have relied almost entirely on the local distributors to translate their packaging and marketing materials. When this organization approached us to help them develop a strategy for their global expansion, one of the key objectives that we determined in our SWOT analysis to be a top priority was to establish “control and ownership of messaging to protect brand reputation and identity”. This is one of the 6 metrics we have identified in the area of Strategic Readiness for companies managing their multilingual communications. In the Balanced Scorecard framework, this metric falls under Quality.

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Mitigation of risks with this objective include:

• Brand management


• Competitiveness


• Legal requirements

If the distributors had full control of creating the messaging used to market this company's products, the company had no way of knowing whether the distributors always adhered to the guidelines and messaging on their U.S. packaging. This is a classic case of an organization risking brand dilution with no way to evaluate which claims were being made or how their brand appeared to buyers. Furthermore, the company's competitive advantage is driven by the claims that are made to entice buyers to purchase their products. A marketing strategy centered around a specific claim may work in one market while it would not be effective – or even legally acceptable – to make such a claim in another country. The U.S. based headquarters of this company had no control over these individual strategies and no way to ensure that each country's legal requirements were being met.

The first step for this company was to centralize and take ownership of the messaging. The second step is to take ownership of the distributor relationship in regards to their control over the messaging. These distributor experts can provide insight into the target market and how best to approach buyers. The distributors sell the product and should be involved in choosing terminology used in the translations. Terminology management became the central focus of this strategy to strengthen the brand, engage the distributors and "hear" their voice and provide linguistic evaluation for the organization to "own their messaging."

This metric in the LSI Client Mentor Program™ provides an action plan of 6 steps that an organization must evaluate and act upon for this objective. The organization is then measured not only on a number of quantitative issues but also on their change of perception in their committment to the objective. A score of "ingrained" with this metric is one more measurable way to move this company efficiently along the path of the Global Communication Maturity Model™.

The benefits of having a centralized approach with well-defined roles and responsibilities are clearly evident to this company We have an efficient and repeatable process (think Baldrige criteria) that can be applied to each new market as our client expands. In addition, we are able to scale efforts within existing markets in a cost-effective way due to the Translation Memory assets we’ve built.