Customer Story
Introduction
When MCIS started offering translation services in the early 2000s, the demand was still low. So the Canadian company started with a custom-made system that was used for booking interpretation assignments.
As translation volumes grew, it became virtually impossible to track the projects with the old solution. MCIS migrated to a dedicated translation management system in 2012 that served well for a few years, until the services diversified and volumes increased even more.
As a non-profit social enterprise, being efficient and controlling costs is of paramount importance to us, as this allows us to keep our services affordable and thus reach the greatest number of beneficiaries. When our translation volumes started increasing, we knew we had to find a better solution for managing the translation side of our organization.Veronica Costea
The Challenges
Lack of granularity
The custom-made system that MCIS was using was lacking the level of granularity that the company needed for both customer and translator profiles. There was also a lack of options for documenting project-specific requirements.
Limited reporting options
The reporting options were limited and often unreliable, which led to increased administrative costs for performing multiple tasks manually. Furthermore, it was difficult to integrate MCIS’s social impact fund allocation (free translation service) for easy and transparent reporting.
Large expenditure of time due to technical problems
Hundreds of hours of staff time were required to manually complete tasks, because of technical challenges and the expenditure of time needed to solve them – with some issues persisting for several months.
The Solution
After the first demo, MCIS was convinced that Plunet had a very elegant solution to all of its major challenges. This was reinforced by feedback that the company received from existing Plunet users, so that in the end the decision to migrate to Plunet was very easy to make.
MCIS appreciated the fact that Plunet is also very supportive of its social mission of providing much-needed translation services to those with difficulty assessing critical information and services.
As we went along with the implementation, we were more and more convinced that Plunet was the solution to all our problems. The system is very consistent from a data integrity perspective, so migrating records from our previous solution was relatively simple. Such consistency forced us to perform a very comprehensive data cleanup which is helping us now to be more efficient.Williams Pedrogan
The Benefits
Easy search for translators
With Plunet, MCIS is now able to accurately track the qualifications of its translators and other language professionals and efficiently match them with customer requirements.
Cost reduction with better CAT tool integration
The CAT tool integration made it a lot easier to expand the use of CAT tools and further reduce cost by ten percent and turn around projects much faster compared to the previous system.
More investments in social impact projects
The translation department at MCIS grew by 25 percent over the two years that the company has used Plunet, while reducing costs by 25 percent. This in turn has meant that MCIS can invest more of its revenue in social impact projects and programs. It included the continuous provision of free services to ensure access to critical information and services for people who would otherwise be unable to afford them. Given the flexibility and versatility of the system, MCIS is now able to accurately track the social impact of its efforts and community investment.
Professional growth of staff
With Plunet’s various automation features, MCIS could realize more efficient work processes. On the one hand, that meant fully eliminating the administrative position that was required for reporting and invoice processing with its previous system, and on the other hand, allowing its staff to grow professionally into a different role by avoiding repetitive tasks.
Outlook
In the next few years, MCIS is looking forward to further expanding its use of Plunet. The company is exploring a potential integration with its accounting system for further cost reduction, along with an enhanced use of CAT tool integration capabilities.
With every new release, we are constantly impressed by the new functionalities available in Plunet, and we feel very grateful to have a partner in Plunet that is always responsive to our ever-evolving needs.Luisa M. Cano
