Measurably improve translation quality in 60 days
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Joint presentation by LifeScan and ForeignExchange Translations [Localization World October 20, 2009]
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Measurably improve translation quality in 60 days
- 1. Measurably improve translation quality in 60 days October 20, 2009
- 26. Methodology Week Focus 1 Definition 2-3 Benchmarking 4-7 Improvements 8 Maintenance
- 37. Q&A
Editor's Notes
- Leading you through how to move from unknown to known quality in 60 days. And, how to utilize this to achieve your business objectives related to translation.
- Elizabeth For audience intros, ask for who they are, company, background with translation and localization, background with quality
- Sonia Objectives of this seminar: Provide all of you with a methodology for moving to known quality which you can then adapt, apply, and implement in your organization. This will allow you to define, analyze, and measure success in meeting your translation requirements. Quality on its own is critical to medical translation, but is only one key factor in ensuring success of any translation program. Just as crucial is meeting your organization’s business objectives, which may include cost, turnaround time, efficiency and throughput, and more (in addition to quality). We will talk through a case study of how ForeignExchange and Lifescan jointly used measured to achieve and exceed Lifesca’s translation business objectives.
- Sonia Key areas we will be discussing today: Translation industry challenge relating to quality? We will then delve into a case study of how Lifescan and ForeignExchange approached defining and improving translation quality, as well as how we partnered to achieve some very aggressive translation program objectives. This will include: Lifescan’s program requirements, including challenges Lifescan was facing, key business objectives, and requirements LFS defined for their new approach to translation How Lifescan and ForeignExchange partnered to meet these objectives. As we discuss this, will walk through start to finish the methodology we used to define requirements for quality through implementation of measurable quality to meet these objectives. We will then walk through the methdology, and how you can apply these quality improvements at your organization. As part of this, we will do a brief demo of the quality measurement system we utilize to track and measure our quality and ensure projects are released per the agreed upon requirements. Lastly, we will discuss as a group, business objectives or challenges faced within your organizations and how to approach addressing these using this approach.
- Sonia Quality is a given. Medical clients, as in all industries, need translations done faster and cheaper while maintained high level of quality. This is particularly challenging and more acute in medical industry where quality is paramount. Medical translations need to achieve 100% quality, but medical companies have an ever increasing focus on delivering that cheaper and faster in order to get their products to market faster and with tighter budgeting constraints. Coupled with that are some unique challenges with their project requirements. The challenge then is in being able to balance these cost and time requirements while knowing you are delivery 100% quality. The solution we will talk through today ensures that there is transparency to quality prior to release of projects for delivery. This transparency allows us to meet cost and turnaround time requirements, as well as a wide variety of projects requirements. Today we will talk through an example of how LifeScan and ForeignExchange partnered to achieve our business goals using this approach. Lifescan’s translation requirements are challenging. This is not unique though, as many of our medical clients are coming to us with much more aggressive cost and time to market objectives, paired with challenging quality requirements.
- Before delving into this approach, we want to provide some background on LifeScan’s challenges that had been identified, how these translated into objectives for revisions to their translation program and suppliers, and key elements to be incorporated into their new program Elizabeth:
- Elizabeth
- Elizabeth:
- Sonia: High level flow chart of steps we will be talking through—how to go about meeting your business objectives through use of measured quality. Especially with a client and supplier relationship, it is critical to go through this methodology together, to effectively accomplish your objectives. The success of effectively defining and implementing a system will depend on commitment of resources and commitment to quality within both partner organizations. Open discussions of processes and systems for both client and supplier enable the best outcome. If one party is not willing to identify address improvement needs, this challenge becomes in many cases insurmountable. Key steps to work through together are: Defining requirements: what are key requirements for quality for the organization. This may range from accuracy to style to consistency, make focus more heavily on linguistic quality, quality of format, or ensuring satisfaction of reviewers. In addition, what other business objectives does that organize have that you need to meet when designing and quality process and system? Determine benchmarks: the organization may have existing benchmarks related to quality, or may need to start from scratch. Identifying how to measure quality (against requirements in #1), and how to measure whether or not you are being successful in meeting business objectives is what will be focused on in this section. Set targets for improvement: once you determine the measurements, the next key step is setting targets for improvement and success criteria, so you and your business partners can be on the same page on whether you are being successful in meeting these objectives. 4. Implementing improvements: having a clear plan for implementing solutions to meet targets is critical to success. We will talk through how to analyze areas to focus on, and how to implement improvements. 5. Once these initial improvements and meet initial targets, what are the next steps to ensuring continual improvement of this process?
- Elizabeth Quality on its own is important, but is clearly not the only focus for any organization. In this business climate, cost, time to market are key priorities. Achieving these priorities is contingent on having a close working relationship between an end-client and translation service provider. Key steps LifeScan and ForeignExchange used to jointly define requirements for the translation program were: Discussion around what LifeScan and ForeignExchange’s business objectives for translation were, and how to best mesh these together. Understanding what quality requirements are for the organization. What does quality mean? This will help to best create a customized system to meet those objectives. Not a simple definition, but needs to include all aspects related to translation and translated products. Reviewed any existing targets and existing performance measurements. Review any existing nonconformities, known issues, and reviewer feedback, to ensure that these are addressed through the quality definition.
- Elizabeth: Took LifeScan’s translation business objectives and combined these with ForeignExchange objectives I think it would be great to spend some time on this slide talking through Lifescan’s background in translations, how things were going when the need to switch strategies and suppliers was identified. This should help give them context to why these objectives were identified by Lifescan.
- Sonia: ForeignExchange vision and corporate objectives focus on our leadership in and commitment to the medical translation space. Specifically, we focus on: Commitment to medical industry and meeting and exceeding our client’s requirements. This means both defining those requirements, and meeting and exceeding them Goal of zero defects in quality (overall and on client basis) 50% improvement in turnaround time in cost, only possible with known quality and working through partnerships with our clients. Cycle times start to finish. Working upstream and downstream allows us to assist our clients in reducing cycle times, reducing rework, reducing reviews, and more. One of the key requirements that came from creation of this vision was the need to be able to measure quality. A bit of background on why ForeignExchange moved: We have been tracking quality metrics for years in numerous forms, nonconformances as reported by clients (as % of words, projects delivered), as well as capturing internal metrics of quality by language. This was based on an integrated linguistic evaluation system that we had been using for years. For each task, we were evaluating the previous step in the process with numeric rating system (for translation, for example, they were being evaluated on accuracy, style, grammar and typographical errors, as well as ease of use with working with them, and on time delivery). These were weighted depending on type of project (marketing vs technical manual). We had identified a need to improve this system. Primarily, it was too subjective (good translation for one evaluator may not match good for another). We were also spend large amounts of time following up on the evaluations, as they were not providing enough detail. Lastly, we were getting the evaluations late for some projects, which prevented us from using this information to correct translations prior to delivery. As we defined our vision and quality focus, we defined requirements for an improved quality management system. The key requirements were: objective evaluations, integration into our FXTracker system for automation of notification and reporting, ensuring on time evaluations, and reducing time spent investigating failed evaluations.
- Sonia: ForeignExchange and Lifescan reviewed our own quality requirements and came up with the following definitions of what quality meant for our relationship, and what we measure when we refer to “quality” What we came up with was: No nonconformities in released products (1 st pass yield). ForeignExchange tracks all quality feedback (Lifescan or ForeignExchange caused), whether issues or nonconformances or opportunities for improvement in our FXTracker CAPA system. Each piece of feedback is entered and documented (by Lifescan or FXT) in the CAPA module, root cause investigated, remedial, corrective, preventive actions, and success criteria identified and tracked. For the purpose of our partnership metrics though, we only focus on nonconformities related to 1 st pass yield. For these purposes, quality is defined as: Accurate translations (no mistranslations, omissions, additions). One key aspect of accurate translations is maintaining regional customizations in the delivered product. Each region has specific requirements and content that must be included in the translated content. This is not reflected in the English source but rather in the requirements for the project. No DTP errors No Print errors This does not mean that style issues, for example, are disregarded, but they are not tracked for the purposes of our metrics and improvement efforts. The other key quality-related requirement we identified was: Achieving this quality level within an efficient system. Ensuring no nonconformities in released products could not be done by adding steps or even keeping status quo for turnaround time. We had to accomplish this while meeting Lifescan’s targets for reduced cycle time and increased throughput.
- Sonia The first step to setting performance benchmarks is again revisiting business objectives. In the case of LifeScan, the focus was primarily on cost and turnaround time, as well as throughput. Quality was a given in the objectives, but also needed to be tracked to be sure quality was maintained as we created process and system efficiencies and improvements. Reviewing the quality requirements (from the previous slide) helped to drive how we would measure quality for our relationship. This did not mean that ForeignExchange was not measuring other areas internally (to ensure this quality result) and that Lifescan was not measuring other areas. For our partnership, we focus on specific areas that help us to meet our objectives.
- Sonia Partnership benchmarks identified: Lifescan’s initial focus was improving turnaround time (47-12 weeks). In order to do this, quality had to be a key focus to be able to deliver against this objective. Review cycles and rework had to be drastically reduced. Throughput was a good indication of how well Lifescan and ForeignExchange were able to efficiently handle large volumes of artwork translation and our ability to scale. Cycle time was defined as start to finish cycle time (from template creation through release). Throughput, artwork delivered per quarter, started at 10/month Cycle turnaround time: started at 47 weeks Quality: 1 st pass yield as percentage of total artwork delivered in a quarter. One of the areas ForeignExchange tracks across all clients is 1 st pass yield errors (nonconformances) as a percentage of target words delivered, as well as a percent of projects delivered in a given timeframe. One of the ways this was customized for Lifescan was measuring this against artwork delivered. This was a much more meaningful metric given the type and scope of work for Lifescan. The word counts handled are fairly low relative to DTP time, template creation, printing. Cost: Savings from TM optimization and reuse—one of the key areas identified is measuring leveraging levels. This is a reflection both on the TM cleanup and optimization work done, as well as Lifescan’s ability to control their source content. Also tracked is volume discounts provided based on volumes of work completed during this process. For each of these, the first step was to measure where we were starting.
- Elizabeth: Steps to setting joint targets 1 st step was to analyzed where we are now (from benchmarks) Then, we reviewed this against long term objectives. What would be a meaningful long and short term target in each area (short term meaning within the next quarter) Targets set: Time: throughput target of 120 artwork per quarter, cycle time target of 12 weeks Quality: zero defects in 1 st pass yield, no nonconformities in released products Cost: trend towards improvements in savings through reuse, increase in discounts
- Elizabeth Key challenge identified as needing improvement was that translation and DTP were being worked on by different suppliers. The translation agency would receive exported Word files. This was used then for translation, edit, and in-country review. Reviewers were not seeing the text in context. Quality errors resulted from this process. In addition, review changes were not making their way into the TM’s. Once reviews were complete, the DTP was done (by separate agency). Quality errors resulted from no final review. All final adjustments made (may have been to source text or target) were not incorporated into the TM’s. Scheduling and turnaround times were large challenges. Files were shuffled back and forth between different suppliers and reviewers. This lead to unacceptably long time to market. There was no easy way to track the review or content changes. Multiple reviewers and approvers were working at the same time, and there was no solid way to track this. In addition, requirements for the project were often in people’s heads, not documented. First pass translations were consistently not meeting printer requirements.
- Sonia: New approach and process were identified by Lifescan and ForeignExchange: Lifescan would consolidate translation and DTP under a single supplier (rather than distributed). This would cut down on the coordination efforts, and would allow for the translators and reviewers to see the translations in context. Translators work from Indesign or other source format, rather than from a nonformatted Word files. QA’s, reviews are done in context in the final format. In addition, printing was brought under the same supplier, so that we could better coordinate requirements. TM strategy would be revised, ensuring that final, approved content is captured in the TM’s.
- Elizabeth: System behind process Other critical area identified was implementation of workflow asset management system.
- Sonia: Once we sketched out the high level procedural changes needed, we got into the more detailed areas, which included: Printer requirements: one of the challenges in meeting printer requirements is that no one had ever documented these. The first step was to work with the printer to understand and document their requirements for the artboards. This was an iterative process, we documented, then refined as we ran into challenges with any shipments. The next step was to extrapolate both from the printer’s requirements as well as from Lifescan’s requirements to create SOP’s and checklists for each step in the process. Because we are creating the source English documents as part of the process, we had to be crystal clear on the requirements. One step to doing that was holding in person kickoff meetings. This was done over the course of 1-2 days, where the project owners at Lifescan would come out and spend time with ForeignExchange’s technical and project teams to review specific requirements as they viewed the artboards together. This helped to establish guidelines for each type of template that could then be applied on all future projects. Instructions for each step were customized to Lifescan’s requirements (translation instructions, QA instructions, etc.) Style guides were customized and approved; glossaries were cleaned up to become user friendly and interactive with the TM’s and automated QA tools.
- Sonia: We then looked at further refining existing processes. The glossaries and TM’s were a source of errors on the initial projects. A cleanup and ongoing maintenance strategy was defined to make these more usable and accurate. Using TM tools such as Olifant and APSic QA, duplication and corruption in TM’s was addressed; and TM’s were made consistent with the glossaries. Process steps were modified to incorporate automated QA steps to reduce the chance of human error in the translations. ApSIC Xbench was integrated to all linguistic steps to ensure mechanical aspects of the text, as well as glossary adherence, accurate handling of not to translate items, were being checked prior to completion of the task. Human QA’s were streamlined to include only those aspects not checked by the automated tools. Another area mentioned previously that was implemented at the same time we were starting up work with Lifescan was the METRiQ quality system at ForeignExchange. We defined the need to have an objective quality evaluation system, which would allow us to: Have objective as opposed to subjective evaluations Integrate the tool into FXTracker, providing automatic notification to the PM’s and quality team if failing evaluations occurred. This allowed for correcting projects prior to delivery. Detailed information provided with the evaluations to ensure easy followup on the reported issues. Resource management using the resulting data. This also would allow for the best teams for each client account to be assigned and managed. Allow for us to release our projects based on quality levels of the projects. We evaluated numerous off the shelf systems and tools (J2450, LISA QA, Blackjack), and found that though they all had merits, they didn’t meet our requirements. In the end, we created our own system, called METRiQ to provide measurements across all client accounts.
- Sonia: With changing process came the requirement to provide training and team changes within Lifescan and ForeignExchange. On both sides, a small team was used to focus on defining and then refining these new processes. This team created documentation and training material to be used. In addition, at ForeignExchange, a new role was defined within our technical team of Gatekeeper. This person screens all incoming Lifescan work to ensure requirements are clearly documented and adhered to. In addition, this person creates or oversees creation of the English source material based on knowledge of the individual templates and requirements. This gatekeeper role includes control of source content and source changes. ForeignExchange designated a primary long-term linguistic team to train on Lifescan specifics, products, glossaries, TM’s, and stylistic conventions. Once the processes and documentation were established, this team was used to train and mentor an extended team. Primary and backup (in some cases multiple backups) teams of PM’s, technical leads, linguistic leads, and linguists (translators, editors, reviewers) was identified and trained. Ongoing mentoring was included depending on position to ensure that Lifescan specifics were shared. The documented requirements and training materials made it possible to utilize extended teams as needed to scale, while having the primary team provide oversight. For Lifescan specifically, we were able to then evaluate against the documented requirements and ensure that quality met requirements prior to releasing the project to ICR. Without the clearly documented quality requirements, this would not have been possible. We also used METRiQ results to assess the linguistic team’s success in meeting requirements, and managed the team accordingly. This included identifying training needs, replacing linguists on the team who may not have met the standard, focusing work on primary team members with strongest performance.
- Elizabeth: weekly status and progress Sonia: data LFS and FXT then worked on completing all actions from this initial plan, tracking data and success against our objectives. This consisted of an initial pilot project set and timeline, followed by ongoing improvement work. During the course of the pilot, and ongoing, weekly status meetings were held to review progress on the specific projects and on the account objectives. During the pilot, there was a consistent focus on the defined improvement plan during discussions. Data was tracked and reviewed at least monthly. The tracking of data was automated to ensure consistent results. Some areas are tracked in ForeignExchange’s system, some in Lifescan’s (such as TAT and throughput) Quarterly, more formal reports on performance are created, using this data. The ForeignExchange AM along with the Lifescan supplier manager review results of data and ensure adequate trending has been done. This is used as input into the quarterly business reviews.
- Elizabeth:
- Elizabeth: QBR’s are a critical aspect of the ongoing success of our relationship. These provide an opportunity for open discussion around: Progress to goals. Using metrics, we assess how we are doing against targets. If we are not achieving targets, we analyze why we are not meeting them, and create corrective action plans to ensure that we are addressing these areas in the coming quarter. For example, we review our 1 st pass yield metrics. By trending root causes, it was apparent at one point that project requirements were not being documented through daVinci consistently, or were being changed. This led to an action plan to address this gap, so that by the following quarter, there was a reduction in issues related to project requirements. On the flip side, when we are able to exceed targets (such as throughput), we can identify why this worked so well, so that we can replicate that moving forward. If a target needs to be adjusted, this can be done at this time as well. We may also see trends or items that need to be addressed, even if they are not resulting in 1 st pass yield nonconformities. These are identified as opportunities and may also result in action plans. Part of the QBR’s is also information sharing on changes at LFS and FXT. If corporate changes will have an impact on the relationship (such as changing business objectives), we revisit how to address these in the coming months.
- With LifeScan and ForeignExchange, we completed an initial pilot period in which we went through these steps. Measured quality was and is an important piece. Achieving aggressive and critical business objectives (such as cutting turnaround time from 47 to 12 weeks) is an ongoing effort. This is a methodology that can be done in 60 days. It may take more time, but is dependent on availability and commitment of resources to be involved, legacy processes and challenges which exist, and more. What is clear is that, without a partnership, it is extremely challenging to try to impact change in an organization. The translation supplier alone may not be able to meet the client’s objectives if the client is not willing to discuss their processes and see where they can contribute to requirements and improvements. Here is how this fits into timeline: Week 1: Definition—ask these questions / input/ output Weeks 2 and 3: initial measurement and analysis, setting targets Weeks 4-7: implement process improvements, tools, training Week 8: measurements, review of objectives, resetting targets Ongoing work
- What are challenges you are facing? Ask for examples: What are we going to do to meet requirement. TAT, innovation, cost, quality—using a quality system to ensure that risks are assessed and addressed. Managing risk and delivering quality. Automated tools, not relying on people Scenarios only if needed