Here we go again. It’s the end of the year. Most people think of snow, Christmas gifts, and having a good time at home with their families.

But for others, it means compiling strategies and sending budget estimates for the next year. If you’re a stakeholder manager, you’re probably thinking of finding new ways to improve your translation process by choosing a translation management system (TMS).

In this article, we’ll break down the most important features to look for when shopping for a TMS.

Ask for Help from the Provider

Customer service is a big part of the technology provider you choose. If you reach out and ask for a demo and communicate with the team, you can get a flavor for how that company treats their customers.

For example, you can request a demo from Wordbee and talk to our experts at any time about any question you might have. Reaching out to a prospective TMS provider gives you a chance to quickly resolve problems, while also getting to know the team and if they seem like the best team in terms of service and customer success.

Scalable, Agile, and Automated Project Workflows

Expanding your business into new regions can be very tricky sometimes. You need to deal with the growing demand for localized content, and you have an immediate and critical demand for translations.

So it’s very crucial when shopping for a TMS to check for reliable supplier management and automated applications that are agile enough to support large-scale translation projects.

In the end, your company needs a TMS that allows its managers to easily automate and seamlessly manage global and complex translation projects. Keep mind that the TMS you choose needs to automate or enhance management in every phase of your business — while maintaining flexibility — and reduce friction in the translation process.

Automated Workflows

Automated workflows are a key component of efficient translation processes. With the right TMS, your company should be able to fully control and automate workflow, so the client can submit the order to work and the system will generate a project, perform a word count for documents, generate an invoice based on pricing information, create the required jobs, and even send out the job proposals.

The benefits of an automated workflow include:

• Faster delivery times
• Cost savings (less management time per task)
• Vastly reduced human error
• Total transparency across jobs, projects, and customers

Some TMSs offer fully automated workflows, but are very difficult for the average user to set up. When you look for a TMS that customizes translation workflow, make sure the customization settings are easy to understand and to manage.

Business Analytics and Data Collection

Strategic translation decisions are a key feature for project managers. Your TMS needs accurate and easy-to-understand business reports, from the number of words translated by each translator, outstanding words awaiting translation, or quick views of completed translation projects.

The bottom line: Business analytics and data collection will help project managers improve their translation project workflow and identify the best opportunities for growth.

Integration

Most enterprises solve their sprawling content problems with a TMS that can integrate with several systems, while avoiding slow, inefficient, and unsecured processes.

Automatically apply the right project automation to the right content source and localize perfectly with minimal management time.

Keep in mind when shopping for a TMS to look for one that offers integration with the most used enterprise applications for content management systems (CMSs), marketing automation, websites, cloud storage like Dropbox or Drive, etc.

Edge Cases

Localization is an industry characterized by edge cases. Keep track of all the little edge cases that you had issues with in the past or try to remember them. Make a list. Maybe it was a scanned PDF for a legal job, or an XML file, or a client that asked to remove Word text that was red from your word count.

Then test that list against every tool that you want to evaluate. We’re confident that Wordbee will score #1 in this test, but what’s important is that you find the tool that fits what you need.