Customers: Rebranding Project for Healthcare Industry
Rebranding Project: Fortune 100 company saves as much as 40% on translation cost
The Client
For a Fortune 100 provider of medical products, helping customers reduce risk is a critical priority. The company's product line includes solutions for the safe delivery of IV drugs plus proprietary software applications and needle-free disposables - all designed to reduce the risk of medication errors. One way the company supports that goal is by maintaining clear and accurate Directions For Use (DFU) documentation for the end users of its products.
The Challenge
In conjunction with a major product acquisition, this client was faced with rebranding and updating a series of product DFUs, including translation into 16 languages. The company took the rebranding as an opportunity to overhaul its approach to updates, making both its DFUs and translation processes more consistent and standardized. The company's goals included:
- Reducing translation costs - with growing translation needs and tight budgets, the client wanted a process that would keep costs under control
- Reducing lengthy in-country validation cycles
- Improving translation consistency - preventing the same text from being translated differently for different products
- Improving and optimizing the use of translation memories (TMs) - translation and software inconsistencies were hindering the company's ability to use TMs efficiently
Together, Tek and the client developed a new DFU translation strategy supported by centralized translation memory management. One global TM would be created for text that was common across products, and individual TMs would be created for product-specific text. Managing TMs in this way would maximize the ability to re-use approved text, minimize each country approver's workload, and keep DFUs consistent.
The project roadmap specified that one DFU would be completely translated and approved, then the resulting TM would be used to translate all remaining documents - thereby keeping approved text consistent across DFUs. This repetitive process of reusing TMs was speeded up using Tek´s TM Batcher which automatically evaluates the work to be carried out for planning and scheduling purposes, and prepares the TMs for the translators to use in all languages.
The project team also created comparison PDFs to show country approvers which sections required review and which were unchanged from the previously approved DFU, significantly reducing approval time.
This process has been further streamlined using the Validation Management Module of Tek´s online On- Demand Globalization Platform. Country approvers will access their translated files for validation and send queries and approvals online. They can also see and work with their validation schedules, TekTerm project glossaries and style guides, and project reference material for translation consistency.
The Benefits
This project enabled the healthcare client to achieve all of its goals, improving consistency across product DFUs, reducing the time and costs of country approval, and leveraging TMs to keep costs and delays to a minimum. All rebranded documents were released on schedule.This resulted in:
- Translation cost savings of as much as 40% resulting from improved TM management
- Increased consistency among product DFUs
- Reduced validation time, because only new text was reviewed, and fewer changes were required
