While preparing for our ISO 9001:2008 audit we always discover interesting facts about the projects we completed. This post describes the data from 2010. 

We recently held our internal audits and management meetings in preparation for our actual ISO 9001:2008 audit coming up in a few weeks. This process illustrates how the company performed over the course of the year. I always like to share that data in a blog post. You can see last year’s data in this post. Here is what we discovered this year:

On-time delivery

We managed 1,233 projects this year. We delivered 98% of those projects on time. We managed to deliver 21% of our project ahead of schedule. The average number of days we were early on those projects was 2.4 days.

Source of business

6% of our revenue came from new business. 33% of that revenue came to us by customer referral. I always look to this number as an indicator of how happy our clients are with our services. I am glad to see a strong number here again this year.

Tracking client feedback

We had 24 instances of client support requests or feedback, 75% of those cases were positive feedback and only 5 of those cases  were related to errors or concerns.  This means that less than 1/2 of a percentage point of our projects had any client concerns. All 5 cases were successfully resolved within 24 hours of the start of the case.   The balance of the cases were documented as suggestions, concerns or  process improvement cases with clients. One of those cases turned into a fully implemented process improvement.

Client savings due to translation memory

On average, our clients saved 18% on their projects due to translation memory reuse.  These savings are now graphically represented in the form of a pie chart on every estimate.

Success of internal projects

As usual, we had set an aggressive list of internal projects for process improvement for the year. We completed some key projects this year including:

-the ability to automatically generate a non-disclosure agreement from our ERP system for our customers and our vendors

-We have completed the second phase in our automated quotation system which has reduced our quotation time by as much as 75% on complex projects

-We have improved our estimate format to provide clients with more data in a more visual way, this estimate is also generated automatically with little additional work from our project managers

-We have implemented ACH processing for almost all vendor payments reducing the time required for check runs by 35%

-We have enhanced our web site with a blog, RSS feed, videos section hosted on Vimeo and a vendors resource area called Translator’s Cantina. We also restarted our quarterly newsletter to customers. These projects allow us to better communicate with our customers and vendors.

-We  purchased  iPads for our entire team with a cloud based collaboration system to keep our employees connected and to allow for better collaboration.

-We also completed a cut over to a centralized cloud based production environment for all of our translations. This allows for real time collaboration between all of our linguists and our clients while using a central translation memory that is updated in real time as projects are being completed. In my opinion, the most important aspect of this change is how easy it is for us to include a client reviewer or subject matter expert in the workflow. You can see a video demo of this process here.