Dr Adriane Rinsche's abstract
Computer-assisted management of technical communication projects
Organising multilingual documentation projects, including the authoring process of technical documentation, is time consuming and expensive. Errors can occur at many levels, and the human memory is limited. A typical project manager is responsible for a broad range of very time consuming tasks. Tasks like budgeting, project co-ordination, client contact, resource management, establishment of deadlines and generation of quotes are integral parts of project management.
Therefore, technical communication companies are in need of automating the relevant business processes as far as possible, making them transparent within the organisation, and providing as much information as viable and sensible to the customers and suppliers in the outside world. It is necessary to manage a human resources database with employees and subcontractors as well as a client database with addresses and a considerable amount of valuable additional information for efficient customer relationship and supplier relationship management. Currently, many technical communication companies use several pieces of software to manage their business processes. However, suppliers and customers should be combined in an integral environment and matched in a project tracking system which contains all relevant project information, all deadlines of all parties concerned, and all financial information. This then allows management to check at any given time what progress is being made by whom involved at any point in the production chain, what the status of any given project might be, what cost benefit relationships can be obtained, and where the company is going in general.
A tool that can make any or all of these tasks even slightly more manageable should be welcomed by any technical communication companies.
THE LANGUAGE Technology Centre, based in Kingston, Surrey, in Britain has developed such an integrated software environment and developed a tool called LTC Organiser that could possibly revolutionise business process management of technical communication companies as well as translation and localisation businesses. This tool is an innovative business process management and workflow control software tool that supports and enables authoring of multilingual documentation and translation projects.
The current version of the tool covers supplier, client, software and project management databases. The tool, which also contains import and export facilities, a finance module, a report module and a quick wizard, succeeds in consolidating all the integral elements of the management of multilingual documentation projects, either locally or via the web.
The application is designed to reduce the cost of managing technical documentation and translation projects, including DTP and printing processes, decrease the time to market, and maximise the benefits derived from human and technical resources.
The talk will describe the most important aspects of an integrated solution, such as
- client management
- supplier management
- project management
- finance management
- translation software management
- reporting facilities
- security and user management
- directory management
- sort and search facilities
- Web facilities: working from distributed sites
- Web forms: giving customers and suppliers access to their records
in LTC Organiser via the internet.
In addition, usability and customisability issues will be examined.
A powerful tool like this allows, for example, the sales force to concentrate
on customer relationship management via the client database, the project
managers to take advantage of the supplier database facilities, the accountant
to import purchase orders, invoices and quotations into the accountancy
environment, and the directors to assess global trends and statistics,
arranged in reports which can be generated from any combination of data
in the database.
About Dr Adriane Rinsche
Dr. Rinsche is Managing Director at The Language Technology Centre Ltd. She has overall responsibility for the company, financial planning, organisational tasks, choice of tools, and workflow control.
Dr. Rinsche has more than 10 years experience in the translation and language engineering industries and has a Ph D in Computational Linguistics from Bonn University, Germany. She founded LTC in 1992, and has worked as a language engineering consultant for multinational companies, several European Institutions, International Organisations and OVUM. She was appointed evaluator for several Calls for Proposals and reviewer of a number of projects within the MLIS and IST programs of DG XIII of the European Commission.
