TMS Challenges: Top 5 Reasons Why Companies Avoid TMS Migration Projects

Bryan Montpetit 0:00
We're gonna move into the speaker. But I want to remind you that during this presentation, we're going to be having a giveaway, not a book, but have a subscription to multilingual. So for the best question that is asked during the presentation, so Yossef boskie, the CEO of MZ Insights is going to be presenting a topic that I think really has impacted most everybody that's worked in language. The challenges are top five challenges on migration. So hi, Joseph. How you doing?

Josef Kubovský 0:34
Good morning, Brian, what time is it for you?

Bryan Montpetit 0:37
It's actually 946 in the morning, so. All right, I see. So happy to have you with us. I won't take up more of your time, because I want you to get your presentation. Again, it's a super interesting topic and why companies avoid TMS migrations. So I think it's affected us all, I will give the floor to you. I'll pop back in right before QA. And this should also indicate time, so we can move to the QA session after that.

Josef Kubovský 1:06
Excellent. And Brian, feel free to jump in anytime. If there's anything you you see that or that you disagree with what I'm saying or anything like that. So first of all, thank you very much for having me, I really appreciate your time. And being part of such a great crowd. It's always a pleasure. I will start sharing my screen. But let me give you a little bit of a background. Why decided I decided to go for this topic. Why have I decided to go for this topic is especially because you know there is tons of different institutions, or localization buyers, or even vendors who are considering whether they should implement a new technology doesn't matter if it's a TMS or any other, or whether they should just stick with what they have. If they decided they want to go further, what should it be, and so on. I won't be taking too much of your time by introductions, let me just also say who we are, we're adding value to people like you to professionals, by education, consultancy and research, anything that's related to the language service industry. I have picked for typical organizations here, especially on the buyer side, who will decide whether they should be actually going for the language for the technology or on languages. And these are typically small companies who are kind of, you know, just getting out there. And most of it, they want to automate the workflow, there's actually not too much need for them to have it, they it would be nice to have, and they're slowly moving there to the level. So maybe they don't even have a localization department yet. It's a part of, let's say, some content division or marketing division. But it's becoming bigger, especially in the last year, you surely saw the NEM z 100. webinar, or just the report itself, where we said that the E commerce industry has grown what was expected to be growing for next 10 years, they've actually managed to do it in three months. So there was a huge progress with those companies. And what do we do now? Where do we pick it? So that's the first type of organization the second one is someone who already you know, they kind of created the localization department? And, hmm, where do we start from, we probably need a budget, if we've already invested in this, they do have some but limited budget, they probably have an expert who's been doing localization before in some other organization. But they need to convince the management, the CFO that yeah, we should be doing this and that. So surely, they will not walk in and say, Okay, let's spend 200,000 or $100,000 a year on a technology that will help us, you know, boosting our international approach. So they have to be very careful in what they're doing. Then the third one, it's my favorite. And you're going to find, again, tons of those that have been investing huge amount of money in the last decades, if not longer into setting up their processes, workflows around localization doesn't have to be TMS only, but anything that has been integrated to the workflow, and we spend 1235, maybe more million already on this process. And now we should change it. Should we really do it? And nobody wants to really be in the position of like, oh, I spent so much money on the migration, and now it wasn't worth it. What do you think is going to happen? Do you think these people will stay there? Oh, that's the major risk, where they're afraid of and then we have the multi vendor strategy where you need to convince the procurement, that actually it makes sense to use si single vendor. And if someone tells them, well, if you had our platform, then you could be using multiple vendors and benefiting from it and having consistent terminology. That's another case, right? So it's, it's basically it's something that goes along. So I've already mentioned those, we have these typical challenges. I don't have time for it. We're just just busy. Or the first one says, we don't have enough expertise to actually pick the solution. It's too risky. I don't want to be blamed. What if it breaks my supply chain? My vendors are not involved and stuff like that. And the last one is, how do I convince them if we already spent so much money or even if we're just starting, or if I'm just being hired? So there is too many of these platforms, right? I'm showing the one of the pages of the of the technology Atlas here. So there is if you go to the DMZ page and a new look at the technology Atlas, you're going to find out there's over 370 platforms. I've came, I actually asked couple of questions to those that we do these consulting projects with, to help you out. But where do you actually get started, you need to think about migration. You need to compare those platforms, you need to look at the workflows, you need to do think off, how are we going to implement it? What are the things who is need to be involved in the implementation of those? And these are typically the answers when we ask them, How long do you think this is going to take us? They usually things 612 months, the reality is that you typically it takes 36 months to create, to convert into a full setup of a solution. If you speed it up, if you have all the questions set, I'm trying to give you a couple of those today. Or if you just simply have someone aside from you can help you with setting up the process there, you can slow it down to 12 months with the larger scope or to six months if your team is really in the first two groups that I showed earlier. So if you are considering if you're planning, please make sure that these this timeframe is actually in it. Why am I saying that? Well, because there are many stakeholders that need to be involved in this. It's not just the localization department, it's anyone around it. It's the content teams, right? Whether we're talking product marketing, is the technology teams, the financials, the procurement, the legal, well, everything else can be, you know, kind of played around and we can play with the procurement, legal financials doesn't matter. But the content and technology teams are actually constantly implementing new setup to constantly considering this is a new platform, shall we migrate to it? Or Wow, this is a great offering this has been involved invented? Why don't we go and implement it. So if your implementation is going to take so long, you need to be speaking about the future? Before you actually start even considering you need to make the circle and go around all of these stakeholders and see what is relevant? Who are the departments? What are their plans? And are they considering the safe the the nice part here is that it's always going to take them approximately, if not longer, the same amount of time as you implementing this platform. So run around, make relationship as we saw in the previous session, I loved it was very nice, make the small talks make a relationship with the other departments because you're going to need it, you are still will need them to give you the take to be able to move on. Alright. So one of the things I mentioned earlier, we stuck with what do we have our current setup? It's old, but it works, you know, evaluating and migrating between translation management system is a lot of work. And there's always a reason not to do it. Right. So you might be the fear of moving away from familiar TMS, even if it's the fifth purpose, the impact on other teams and external stakeholders, or the prospects of the time technical work or cost involved. Right. So here's the question that I asked those guys. Do you know what is the business impact that outline or degradation, the TMS in the localization ecosystem? It's typically the disconnection or it's our baby. We just we've been working with him for decades, we've been investing building it, you know, integrating, we have built in house integrations with it and stuff like that. So these are the things that you definitely need to keep in mind. Again, business analytics, and effective processes and reporting sub optimal localization leverages high variations, frustrated people, that's the most important one and honestly, how can we become better professionals? If we are constantly stuck where we are, can we be playing with the latest trends? Can we be pushing our departments or teams and you know, the organization to the next level? If we are stuck with what we're having so far? No. So let's, let's start evaluating and figuring out whether it even makes sense, because that's the typical question where we need to start, we need to evaluate what we have, look at the different options, and then go from there and go from there. So well, I don't need to do anything. I don't need a platform, because my vendors have it. And I can just stick with them. It's all good, right? What if you want to change the vendor? What while the vendor collaboration? What do you know that if if the vendor is supporting you with selecting the technology, they will not just pick the preferred tools for them, or something that they build in house? You know, and then we have this organizational culture? Where

what is your organization actually do? Is there a business continuity planning? Do we actually have like joint vision, we're just speaking with a company who simply is attack organization, and they just want to be on top of things, right? What they have today works fine. They are a little bit frustrated. So they're just going to the management and the management saying, yes, we want to be how to things, we want to have a business opportunity out there, we want to become global organization. And we can only do it if we use the latest trends. So it is the business continuity, and then the risk management. All right, simple. Where do you see the highest value of the TMS consulting? So what if someone as a vendor or third party comes in? Right? It typically saves months, and we already talked about, you know, pressing this down and, and actually having having less time to involve in that we also mentioned that you don't need to be an expert there. You can accelerate the outcomes, you can simplify the complexity. And the most importantly, when you do it, you do it right. So I will keep keep that in mind. And I jumped a little bit forward. So what if you will be speaking to the CFO? Typically, the question is, what's the ROI on it? Should we be even, you know, implementing that? So what we're looking at the technology research, internally introduced implementation and updates, these are the typical costs on our end that we need to be looking at now. The other one is the value. So what are we getting out of it? Right? So we are overcoming the typical challenges we're helping are the other departments to be more effective that I don't need to repeat this again. But in the Mimsy report, in the DMZ 100 report, it's been said multiple times that people are looking for data, you know, buyers are ready to invest in buying data. If I have my own technology, if I can collect my technology, and and even better if I'm able to clean up the data, why don't I just have it ready there? Why don't I plan and support my internal departments, the content creators with the data that we can collect through the platform platform that we have, as the localization department. I've already mentioned that if you have the right setup, you can try new things, you can move ahead, you can become better professionals automations. And for I mentioned CFOs. At the beginning, well, you can have control of the language quality, but you can have a business intelligence there. And now most interestingly, it's not only about the non localization metrics, and that's where you get the CFO most of the time. So the business intelligence plays the most important role here, in my opinion, when you're doing the internal conversations, and you want to make sure that you're speaking the language of your internal stakeholders, and that's where you give them give them good good income. Now, which data in European matters the most when considering a change? So it's the workflow it's the content, and here's the most important is on the top context integrations, business intelligence, as mentioned earlier, it's the workbench quality, the costs and the the amount of waste in the system. Tips for those who are in the startups, I typically see that these people do a lot of research, I would just bring you to the the two tools built and owned by my lovely colleague, Yulia Yulia, if you're here, we compare the different feature among the platforms, you know, and you can simply figure out which one matches your criteria. Now, if you're looking at multiple, you can actually look at which one fits in versus the others and so on. Oh, this is definitely something, something to look at and build it there. Then the second way is basically putting together the questionnaires and asking yourself questions, whether once again, the finance or the integrations, or the transcreation, or the acuity management, sorry for jumping around, but just trying to give you the scope, the idea of a scope of what are the things that we need to focus on what what could be interesting or important for us to look at, whether it's business service, or whether the key issues, and then we usually have an interview with these type of guys, and just kind of guide them through the most important questions they might have forgotten to ask themselves. And then there's typically a Ford four dimensional value map, containing the five TMS candidates and recommendations that we see are the are the most events. So basically, kind of creating this, this nice map for yourself to understanding where you are. And then having a consultation with a third party is, is very helpful for those companies who are accelerating, who have, you know, the recently created localization department and having an expert who really sees the value of it, and have been probably using it somewhere. But how do I do it so that we don't invest tons of money on not only purchasing the platform, but also implementing and selecting the right one for us? So I like this, this matalon methodology here. The next one are, as I said, my favorite, you know, we have a huge environment, we have a huge platform to be to be sitting there, and what do we do about it? What's the vice highest value here? You know, we've mentioned that earlier. Language technology consulting in regards to the the large scope, what are the things that we need to look at? And we need to evaluate? So look at the current setup, survey, the internal requirements? Who does use the system directly? or indirectly? We already mentioned this, you know, a content creation team. These are obvious, but what about the technology? What about the legal departments? You know, what about the procurements, all of these need to be interactive, they need to be interviewed, ask the right questions to make sure that we're actually doing and we're going to the right setup of our ecosystem, right, narrowing down the scope. interviewing the vendors, this is always a very good setup in then the phase two typically is when you, when you evaluate the integrations, you look at the fine tuning of the requirements, you would typically have two three candidates here. And then running an RFP, RFI three, piloting, testing out seeing whether these candidates really match with your criteria, I typically suggest only at this point to look at the pricing, because otherwise you may get distracted. And and it doesn't really make any sense anyway, to kind of look at those platforms, even if they are cheaper. Or if they're extremely expensive, you figure out that probably it's not the right solution. But at the same time, this is what we want to achieve in the future. And then the last phase, but very important, is the implementation, because you're going to see very often that we are being promised certain setup, but it's hard to deliver. Because the even though the organization was actually developing the platform, or in this case, a TMS developer couldn't be doing their best. It's very hard to integrate to your internal, very, very specific setup. So there has to be this cooperation between your teams and the vendor teams. And you need to make sure that all of that is structured and well positioned. That's it. Brian, do I have you there? Wasn't I speaking to myself all the time?

Bryan Montpetit 18:59
I am here. I apologize. My camera just like but that was fantastic. Thank you for that. And naturally, we can move into QA which is then there were questions coming in. So while people are chiming into ask live questions, and we do encourage live questions, which means you don't have to share your camera, but we'd love to see your face. You can definitely use your voice to to ask the questions. I'm sure he has a full have us a wealth of information. So he'll have the answers for you. One of the questions that has been uploaded quite a bit as we went through was what would be your personal favorite TMS?

Josef Kubovský 19:38
Oh, that's a good question. But I think I said so many different reasons why you have to be very specific when selecting a platform that it very much depends on what and who was actually looking for it.

Bryan Montpetit 19:54
That's a very diplomatic answer. Thank you for that. And just to remind everybody, we do have a giveaway for a book. And we really encourage you to ask your questions. So it shows that it's going to go through and actually select the the best question. So again, people continue to upload that last, that last question, because I think they're really curious. But another one that's come in, I had an upvote was, what innovative ways have you seen customers gaining data from LSPs? Or mlvs?

Josef Kubovský 20:28
I'm, I have another diplomatic answer. But I'll try to minimize the diplomacy here. You know, I think the most critical part is what kind of organization is actually running it, we have very specific, you know, setup there, there could be looking, especially for the business analytics, business intelligence recently is really turning stuff into much more importance than ever before. So having a full scale of what's going on with my data even because it's not only vendors, right, it's the sub vendors and sub sub vendors, and only then freelancers, and what's going on through the entire food chain. I think that's the critical point where we want to have a good understanding of what's happening with the data, and where's it flowing. And that goes back to what I said earlier regarding the data, the buyers willing to invest in by data being cleaned up, right, so I need to have a good control over what's happening with the data and whether it actually can be possibly even cleaned up. So that's what I liked the most from this perspective, and as the latest strength.

Bryan Montpetit 21:41
Okay, thank you for that answers. Again, I will let the audience decide whether that answers your question. But I think it did answer indeed, one of the other questions has been uploaded, which was for a small LSP. How they can use data generated from the TMS and how they can benefit from it.

Josef Kubovský 22:08
I, so there's different views, you can look at this particular question. So the, I would say, as a small LSP, you definitely need to value the information that you're gathering about the customer. So I love and I've been, I've been actually consulting this week to translation companies about their website, and how can they win more business through their website. And I love the approach where, you know, simple as allowing them to do machine translation through your website for free, but having control over what type of content how often, you know, in which people are, are actually gathering that's good enough, right? You don't, you don't need to be too advanced of building your own environment and, and storing your own data. But at the same time, and that's the other perspective, as the as the owner, I would be strongly, you know, considering whether I have anything specific, I have a niche on the market, where I can collect and be unique on the market, and really focus on all of those things and gather the content and the and the data. there that could be the clients leveraging later on and could be willing to invest money. And and if you look at the m&a Recently, this is very much about the data as well. And you don't have to be a big player. Right.

Bryan Montpetit 23:33
Agreed. 100%. So with respect to, to another question, they're asking more about the migration aspects. So do you have any advice on how to avoid using two or more TMS systems in parallel? For a long time while you're performing the migration?

Josef Kubovský 23:50
Is this a question by a vendor or by client?

Bryan Montpetit 23:53
I actually do not know. Someone can actually chime in with that diver. And I think that was, that was your question if you can, but if you can actually answer it on both cases, perhaps I'll try. I'll try. I'm trying.

Josef Kubovský 24:08
So you know, it's very typical. I've already mentioned the case with the last type where we've been developing something and we're working in it. And now the now we're seeing that some of the internal departments cannot be integrated with this platform. So we extract it, and then we ended up with using a completely different setup. So I would just say, it is the right time for you to migrate to a system that can actually do it all. The question is, is there one in the end, right, because it's very, it's very typical that you know, although there is these 370 platforms that simply they cannot, you know, manage everything using a middleman and and our lovely h1 Langlais and his be lazy, you know, platform where, you know, they hear actually helps you with migrating from one platform to another is is a very interesting setup for this particular case on the vendor side as well.

Bryan Montpetit 25:10
Perfect. And there are a lot of people that are wondering as well. And again, apologies if I'm not, I'm not discussing between and I just want to get as many questions as we can because the question so when we were talking about the the local locally installed systems like or assessors referred to in the question, bulky TMS is such as Toronto's remember q? When is it a better option to use cloud based versus these locally installed? applications?

Josef Kubovský 25:39
So, back in 2003, I worked with EA. And we would be bringing the the gamers, the community to work with us on the content on our computers, right in our offices. So they couldn't take it out. I think, in my opinion, that is that is the right moment for implementing such technology. If it's a server based and you're still giving them and here I am not. I'm not an expert, right. I'm not an expert on security. I'm just simply saying from the user perspective, government institutions. Yeah, I shouldn't say the connection. But the the government institutions, of course cannot, you know, afford to have that type of setup. But if you look at it from the general perspective of most of the institutions, most of the organizations, Well, honestly, you can have the same amount of security within the cloud as you have on the server. And reality is, how many of us do actually have the server installed in our premises? Right.

Bryan Montpetit 26:59
Yeah, I think, look, having a server locally on our premises is just another security risk as well. I mean, that's something that people normally don't want to get into, because of the security requirements, especially passing audits and things like that. So you know, I can definitely understand the circumstances that you mentioned. But

Josef Kubovský 27:17
yeah. This reminds me of God bless him. Peter, having a small translation company in Germany had an accident and died three years ago. But I remember him telling me a story where his competitor would hire a Teef to go and steal his computer from his office. And he wouldn't hack the computer, you know, so, I mean,

Bryan Montpetit 27:46
this industry isn't exciting. Wow. Yeah, that's, that's a crazy story. I sincerely hope no was targeting my computer. So we've got, we've got a few others that I just wanted to make sure that we got to because we have a few more, a few more minutes. Sorry, I'm just scanning as we go through. So someone here Anna, is in the process of implementing a TMS. At her company, which is a midsize tech company, it's hard enough to leverage for, for the budget for the TMS. Oh, sorry. And it just popped down. Nevermind leveraging the budget for TMS consulting. Do you have any tips? So obviously, there's it's a two part question. We're looking at, you know, trying to get the budget for the technology itself, in addition to consulting. So.

Josef Kubovský 28:36
So I like I talked a lot about having the interviews and and kind of, you know, scanning, what is required, you know, and what are the different integrations? And how do these department needs to cooperate. And that's a great moment for change management, right, to actually change their perspective of things. And I gave a couple of tips on what is important to speak about in front of different procurement. So I like to call them a swear word. But these are these, you know, teams that don't really care much about what else is anything else then savings, right, for example, or anything else, then making clear that we are going to benefit from it as per legal department. So we do a lot of change management consultation at the end of the day as well when consulting the TMS setup. So I would say Anna, when I'm happy, feel free to reach out to me at Joseph at NIMH z.com. And I'm happy to talk to you about this particular case, but it very much depends. But I would start with having the small talks and change management conversations basically.

Bryan Montpetit 29:48
Awesome. Have one I think it's something I'm interested in hearing as well is tell us about his TMS migration that has gone horribly wrong. Please don't mention the client's name, but we'd love to hear about the The situation?

Josef Kubovský 30:02
Yeah. So if I'm am I'll try to I'll try to minimize the what is the typical budget? Brian, that you remember that a large organization would invest into purchasing a translation management system?

Bryan Montpetit 30:25
are we referring to those within the industry? So? Or are we talking about clients or private sector? And clients

Josef Kubovský 30:30
and clients? You know, how much would you would you think they would spend on on translation platform per year?

Bryan Montpetit 30:39
I've seen north of 100k, easily.

Josef Kubovský 30:43
Exact. Exactly. Yeah. So the worst case scenario I saw was, they would spend more than 20 times on just an identifying what is the right setup, and they still haven't take the right option. And it was just because of the change management, because the there were, you know, there's so much disconnected, that actually, you know, they were pulling back and forth. And it it takes it took many years, before they actually make the made the decision.

Bryan Montpetit 31:23
So was that just a case of like analysis paralysis, where they just keep evaluating? And just keep asking the same questions, getting different answers, oh, no,

Josef Kubovský 31:30
there was much more investment in internal development on something that was not going to be working later and things like that. Okay. So, so and you know, it's like you and, honestly, that's why I put the number of months that it takes you before you actually make a decision, right? Because we have to realize that all of these people, all of these departments are constantly involved in the decision making process of being interviewed and testing out the systems, and all of that, right. And then we need to when we're talking about the implementation, I already mentioned that you need to build some integrations also from the internal systems, right. So that also requires some investments, and all of that is interconnected. And that will cost us money. So it is typical, that you would spend on the decision making process about the same amount as you would pay for about the same amount of money you said for the first year. That typically, that's very typical in any type of technology implementation, right? That's approximately the amount of money you spend on.

Bryan Montpetit 32:42
Okay, I can definitely see that. One of the other questions come in. What do you see as the most common TMS use cases? You can see in TMS consultancies? Are there general categories of buyers that you would see in the market?

Josef Kubovský 32:57
I, I hope I did accomplish the mission with splitting them into the four groups that I was showing earlier, when speaking about the first group, they are just like, this would be good to have, we have the cash because we you know, manage to and we want to push on expanding. The second group was, we have built a localization department, there is an expert. The third, the third group is we have something for ages. We don't want to leave it. And the last one is vendor collaboration and setup.

Bryan Montpetit 33:31
Awesome. We've got a minute left. So we're like perfect on time. So I'll throw one more question at you. And this is one that I think impacts especially language agencies, or companies that have migrated to a new or are migrating to a new new platform, often with respect to their linguistic assets, translation memories term basis. Can you explain the the concern of loss of data in the transfer? And how it may impact for example, the revenue in terms of matches for memories and things like that?

Josef Kubovský 34:07
Is it really a TMS challenge? Or is it the workflow challenge? That's how I said it.

Bryan Montpetit 34:14
Okay, because I think from a technology perspective, I mean, when you're switching, you know, migrating Team X Files to, you know, a new platform from your old one, trying to reinstate those translation memories, oftentimes, they won't migrate perfectly, and there's going to be penalties and people are concerned about loss of revenue.

Josef Kubovský 34:30
So, yeah, the, what I wrote, it really depends what, which one are you migrating to which one, but it is very typical that and I don't want to shoot a number, but if you asked me to shoot one, I'd say typically, you can easily lose 10% of it. But at the same time, there are some of the platforms and I think there was a question from this person that that was involved in developing a platform like that. that will actually help you to minimize the loss. Right? Between you and I. Guys, the reality is does it really matter if we lose some of the data? Do we need all of that data? Do we need the TMS? Or do we need the cleaned up data?

Bryan Montpetit 35:18
Great answer. Thank you for that. Now's the time for you to pick the best question. I know there was a lot of them.

Josef Kubovský 35:25
Where do I find them? So I can list through? Because I'm only seeing three now?

Bryan Montpetit 35:30
Oh, yeah. Because others have probably been answered. So that's, that's a good question. Let's see if we can actually pull those back in. If not, we might have to call in the you know, the big guns. And I don't actually see the audit. So what we're gonna have to do is like, what I recommend is we actually not announce it yet, but we will announce it on the next one. Once the team gets you those questions. You can go through them.

Josef Kubovský 35:57
Okay, I will do that. And thank you very much. It's been

Bryan Montpetit 36:01
fun. And are you sticking around for networking?

Josef Kubovský 36:05
Oh, definitely. I'll be around. And I wish luck from home best of success. And thanks for thanks for joining me today, Brian.

Bryan Montpetit 36:13
Perfect. Well, thank you for all the information I all the answers to the questions. It was great having you and I look forward to speaking with you soon.