Last week, we spoke with Alison Toon, Hewlett-Packard’s peripatetic evangelist for systematic translation management. She told us about the company’s plan to make multilingual content management a core element of HP’s growth strategy. This came about as a result of a partnership with HP’s Global Supply Chain Services (GSCS) organization, which is responsible for procurement, supplier management, and transforming the way HP manages processes such as printing and shipping documents to customers.

According to Toon, HP will:

• Spread the Translation and Localization (T&L) Group’s gospel throughout the company. Over the last 10 years, Toon’s T&L Group has developed a set of best practices, processes, and technologies that are now used by about a third of HP’s business units with translation requirements. As part of this initiative, the T&L Group’s process and technology will become the standard approach for all the company’s translation and localization efforts.
• Establish a program to identify, evaluate, and certify language service providers to translate and localize HP products, documentation, and market materials. Once this certification program is in place, the company will work with just these suppliers.
• Require LSPs to use what HP has dubbed its Enterprise Translation Management Architecture (ETMA). The foundation component of this technology and process framework is currently SDL Trados GXT, but the T&L Group is in the midst of migrating to SDL TMS, its go-forward translation management system.

What led Hewlett-Packard to undertake this strategic move? HP spends tens of millions of dollars each year on translation and localization projects. With more than two-thirds of its revenue originating outside the United States – and plans for even more to come from international sales – spending on translation was sure to increase or customer service would decrease. The company needed to further optimize how it prepared products for international markets.

Enter the T&L Group  which has long lived our premise that a single unified process and supporting IT infrastructure would result in the greatest business benefits for HP. Standardizing services would drive efficiencies in process, procurement, vendor management, and technology. Measured against Common Sense Advisory’s benchmarks for localization maturity, the T&L Group operates as a Level 4 organization with the potential to break into the topmost Level 5 in the coming years. That positioned the Group to make the pitch for standardizing its approach across the company. How did they do it? Toon’s team followed the “executive sponsorship” playbook:

• Ride a bigger issue. Rather than go it alone with the usual “improve translation efficiency” message, the T&L Group hitched its wagon to an executive-sponsored, pan-HP, Global Supply Chain Services-led initiative in the company that will improve how HP does anything related to print and content, including marketing.
• Showcase success. The T&L Group highlighted its success stories in the translation and localization projects that had embraced its process and technology. Its business case included an analysis of savings and efficiencies, and sought input from expert and independent third parties, such as Common Sense Advisory.
• Talk the talk of business. High on the T&L “benefits” list were concepts like control over brand, consistency, and better cost control, all music to executive ears.
• Find the right partners. The T&L Group worked with Global Supply Chain Services (née Procurement) to establish a global translation and localization strategy that encompasses  global reach, as well as the principles and process for finding and certifying vendors.

With this business-focused message and bigger team, the T&L Group sought – and received – executive sponsorship. The program was reviewed and approved in HP’s corner office. Toon’s team is actively at work planning the ETMA roll-out across the company. What’s the down side? HP’s executives want to implement ETMA in half the time that the T&L team proposed. Toon told us to “be careful what you wish for.” The T&L Group certainly has its work cut out for it, but nearly 10 years of successfully managing diverse translation and localization projects greatly increases the odds of success.