Read this article about IBM, Finalist in the Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Business Transformation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2021 Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.
IBM’s Globalization team transforms to a centralized, continuous globalization process that leads to cost-efficiency and faster time to market
Enabling the ‘I’ in IBM. As the name implies, International Business Machines (IBM) is an international company, operating in 175 countries around the world. With such a broad reach and today’s expectations by customers that the products they use support their language and cultural conventions, the IBM Globalization team had a challenge to ensure that all our global teams can efficiently deliver high quality products for IBM customers, at the speed of today’s business.
The IBM Globalization team works with hundreds of product development teams across 15 business units to translate and test products, documentation, and marketing material.
In the past, this team operated in silos across 17 translation services centers. Each of those centers engaged their own vendors for translations and they each made their own optimizations to the process. The result was that IBM was working with 100+ vendors worldwide and did not have a centralized process. The workflows used 20+ on-premises tools, and not all of them were talking to one another.
The result was that the product development teams would often make products available in English first and then wait 1-3 months for the globalization processes to complete to make their products available in key markets such as Japan, Germany, France, Latin America, and China. With over 60% of IBM revenue coming from outside the US, this delay in product availability had a direct impact on the bottom line.
Starting in mid-2020, the team embarked on a large business transformation to radically simplify, modernize, and digitize globalization operations. The team used the IBM Garage Methodology approach and created six agile squads for execution. The squads focused on:
This means that product development teams can now directly integrate the globalization pipeline into their DevOps processes. Now, product strings and user interface are automatically extracted from the source code, automatically machine translated into multiple languages and then integrated back into the product build. In parallel, the strings and user interface aspects are sent to the vendor to review and edit the translations across all the required languages. For the first time ever, this enables continuous translation to be a part of the product development process, so that they can have their product available in multiple languages right from the first build.
Based on this business transformation, we are seeing significant business impact:
We are excited with these results and poised for growth as we deliver global ready products to IBM’s worldwide clients faster than ever before!
Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards 2021
The Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards have been established to showcase globally the most outstanding achievements through the application of Business Transformation, Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence & Innovation Excellence programs. Click here to view the Press Release.
The winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at The Digital Transformation & Operational Excellence World Awards (DTOES) on Wednesday, December 15th, 2021, from 6:30 PM at Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld®.
The Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards are open to all organizations, both private and public sector, across the globe, which have implemented Business Transformation, Digital Transformation, Operational Excellence & Innovation Excellence programs to deliver outstanding business results.
The Awards will be held in conjunction with the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit, BTOES 2021 on December 15, 2021, at the Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld®. Click to access the agenda, view the current speakers, and watch the highlights video from last year.
BTOES is the industry’s biggest and best, senior-level, cross-industry gathering of Business Transformation & Operational Excellence industry leaders and senior executives.
With over 150 speakers, over 100 sessions, 12 Keynotes, 9 Track Themes, 5 parallel tracks, 60+ track sessions, 50 roundtable discussions, 20 Interactive Workshops, 6 Thought Leader Panels, 5 Leaders Boardrooms, 5 co-located events, the Industry Awards Program, Site Visits, 20+ hours of social networking including 2 gala cocktail parties, dinners, numerous group activities, this is the ultimate event to benchmark, network and drive Operational Excellence to the next level.
Quick Links
There is a strong focus on Cultural Transformation, Customer Delight, Sustaining an Operational Excellence program, Need for end-to-end Business Transformation, Keeping up with new technologies/impact of digitalization and Leadership Buy-in & Understanding. We dedicated two tracks to advanced technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA, Predictive Analytics, Blockchain, Cloud infrastructure etc.
The agenda is designed to encourage active meaningful conversations through all day enhanced networking and interaction opportunities, including
For more information please email info@proqis.com