Application of the principles of the ISO 9001 quality management system to a translation company

Application of the principles of the ISO 9001 quality management system to a translation company

19% of LSPs are certified in the ISO 9001.  As a professional services industry that is driven by process and can create substantial business risk for its clients, this statistic should be concerning to its clients.  Anecdotally, the most common reason I’ve heard for language service providers (LSPs) to forgo the certification is the lack of return on investment (ROI). While it might be difficult to quantify some sources of ROI, the access it provides to clients who are also certified in the ISO 9001 could be reason enough.  This article will focus on the application of the principles of the ISO 9001:2015 quality management system to BURG Translations. Below are the principles:

  • Client focus
  • Engagement of people
  • Evidence-based decision making
  • Improvement
  • Leadership
  • Process approach
  • Relationship Management

As the principles of the ISO 9001 include client focus and relationship management, among other things, the ROI should be nearly self-evident.  

Client focus

Quality is defined by the client as their requirements and expectations.  The goal is to meet, and ideally exceed, their expectations.  

Translations is a professional service that can be tailor made.  Just as there is more than one way of saying the same thing in English, there is more than one way of saying the same thing in other language.  When the opportunity arises, such as working with sophisticated clients with in-country reviewers or corporate branding or style guides, LSPs can personalize their service to meet their client’s needs – down to the letter.  

We guide clients through the Client Engagement Lifecycle, which begins by understanding what a successful relationship looks like from their point of view.  From here, we confirm what this looks like at a project level and collaborate to define what cost-effective quality looks like. The goal is to ensure that everyone is in agreement on what the desired outcome is and how to achieve it.  

Engagement of people

Willing and capable people are required at all levels of the organization to successfully deliver value to a client.  

Members of the language industry know that it’s a low-margin industry.  People who join and stay in the industry are driven by their passion for language and culture.  The work is also extremely demanding, trying to juggle multiple projects across multiple time zones in which human error can surprise you at any moment along the way.  Find and fostering good people who fit the industry needs is extremely challenging.  

The industry has a “burn and churn” problem regarding project managers and associated roles leading to an average employment period at an LSP of only about 2 years.  Our approach of addressing this was by complicating the role with additional responsibilities. The team was transformed from project managers to consultants, requiring higher calibre team members applying a different approach to meeting client’s needs with comparable increases in compensation.  

Evidence-based decision making

Decision making based on real world data is more likely to achieve the desired results.  

The translation industry is historically technologically adverse.  As technologies such as translation memory were developed, they were not well received.  Today, as machine translation has bent client’s expectations of what is humanly possible, the language industry again resists opportunities to collaborate with the machine.  

In 2012, the company underwent a technological overall that unified our systems and allowed for greater data collection, management and analysis.  The analyses are reviewed daily in meetings to validate productivity, efficiency and effectiveness. Team members at all levels of the organization understand the lens through which Leadership views their contribution.  These analyses, or dashboards, have also been used to automate merit-based compensation and efficiently align individual members of the team with team and company quality objectives.  

Improvement

Successful organizations continually focus on improvement.  

WIth the exception of computer-aided translation (CAT) tools and machine translation, the translation industry has not changed much in the past 20 years.  However, with a little bit of client insight, LSPs can discover new language-related services to solve client problems.  

“No rest for the best” is a slogan that can be found in our company handbook.  It signifies one of the three pillars of our team culture: perseverance. In recent years, we have increased the sensitivity to which we define reportable non-conformances in order to find more opportunities for improvement.  Now, most time in daily, weekly and monthly team meetings is spent considering improvements to results and associated processes. In the past 6 years, BURG Translations has increased its service offerings from one service (translations) to over 20, including document review, health literacy analysis, transcription, eLearning and many more.  

Leadership

Upper Management unites under a singular vision to foster a culture that facilitates achievement of the quality objectives.  

Every business best functions when the company gathers around one singular vision.  Articulation of this vision can be a challenge for Leadership, but good quality, third-party-audited documentation helps tremendously.

The Quality Manual has taken center stage as the reference document by which all other training and process documentation stem from in the company.  It’s scope has grown, not only to define quality of output, but to define quality of client experience, starting from initial client discovery in the Client Engagement Lifecycle to post-sale client development.  The purpose of Leadership is essentially to remove any barriers that the company might face in realizing the aspirations of the Quality Manual.  

Process approach

Coordinated activities can achieve consistently desired results with high efficiency when understood and managed as part of a larger coherent system.  

“Luck” and “hope” can be removed from an LSP’s winning recipe for coordinating complex multinational projects or business development practices.  

All components of all services are defined as processes in the company, including activities that include communication with clients.  Interpreting all activities as coordinated efforts towards predefined outcomes simplifies training, clarifies expectations and improves the accuracy of quantitative metrics.  

Relationship Management

Managing relationship with all stakeholders, including suppliers, is a requirement for sustained success.  

Vendor management is a standard requirement for the vast majority of LSPs.  Unfortunately, due to demands from clients and oversupply from “bilingual experts”, vendors are not historically treated as true partners but as adversaries to be negotiated with, usually down to the penny. Good business practices around supply chain management would be welcomed in the industry.    

With the inclusion of the Global Strategic Partnerships Manager (GSPM) to Leadership, management has a complete view of the services supply chain by which to measure, track and address professional services performance and outcomes.  The GSPM is responsible for ensuring the in-house team is equipped with the resources they need to optimally perform and suppliers are treated as a key extension of the in-house team and are recognized for the crucial role they play in service delivery.  

Summary

A large part of compliance with the ISO 9001 is documentation.  Documentation is what allows for agreement between people (you write it together), accountability (you can point to it), responsibility (you can reread it), proof of completion (you can write it), and analysis for improvement (you can update it).  The trouble is that you have to write it in the first place, and stick to it. Any organization that is willing to scale must have a strong foundation of documentation to stand on first.  

If you’d like to learn more about how BURG Translations helps you ensure high-quality translations, contact us today.