Top 10 Reasons To Pursue a Language Service Vendor Consolidation Strategy Now

Reason #2: Reduce Costs

Enterprises may reduce their costs in multiple ways with a single vendor approach, achieving up to 40% savings as they review their entire content and localization setup.

• One of the primary financial burdens of a multi-vendor strategy is the ongoing expense associated with managing the relationships of multiple localization vendors. Each vendor relationship incurs costs related to those repetitive administrative tasks (as mentioned above), which can quickly accumulate, creating a significant financial drain.

• Human effort is expensive. Reducing the human effort throughout content creation and localization through the use of AI-enabled technology, coupled with vendor consolidation, will significantly reduce costs.

• Operating a TMS is costly. Using Lionbridge’s Aurora AI platform eliminates the need for a TMS on your side. For more information about this, jump to reason #10.

• You’ll position yourself to get volume-based pricing when giving a single vendor all your business.

Reason #3: Attain Consistency Across Markets

Maintaining uniformity in terminology, tone, style, and brand voice becomes a significant challenge when working with multiple vendors. Each vendor may have its own interpretation of your brand’s guidelines, leading to discrepancies in the translated content. These inconsistencies can confuse your audience and dilute your brand’s message, impacting customer trust and loyalty.

Organizations can achieve a cohesive brand voice that resonates uniformly with global audiences by centralizing content creation and translation efforts with a single vendor. The vendor can manage and maintain centralized Translation Memories (TMs) and terminology, ensuring that all translated and localized content adheres to the same standards, which will consistently reinforce the brand’s identity and message across different regions.

Moreover, a vendor consolidation strategy simplifies the implementation of brand guidelines with well-established parameters into increasingly automated workflows. Incorporating a centralized and AI-first approach is important to ensure that your partner uses LLMs to allow for centralized and language-specific customizations that reflect your preferences and will reduce the amount of human effort required. The result is a seamless and consistent brand experience for customers in all markets, enhancing brand recognition and loyalty.

Reason #4: Enhance Quality

Quality is closely linked with consistent output and is enhanced by a single-vendor approach.

Quality levels can vary with a multi-vendor approach, with each vendor following different processes and standards. By consolidating to a single vendor, organizations can ensure that all content goes through a uniform process, from content creation through localization and Quality Assurance (QA), adhering to the same standards.

With a single vendor, it is easier to establish and maintain comprehensive quality control measures. The vendor can implement consistent review cycles, employ standardized TMs and glossaries, customize LLM-enabled workflows, and utilize advanced AI-driven quality management tools.

This uniform approach minimizes the risk of errors and discrepancies, ensuring that the localized, multilingual content is accurate, culturally nuanced to each market, and fully aligned with the brand’s guidelines. Additionally, collaborating with a dedicated team that understands your content goals, brand, and quality expectations leads to continuous improvement over time, ensuring that you reach your objectives with your content.

Reason #5: Increase Speed and Scalability

A single-vendor approach to language services enables you to scale and accelerate your global content initiatives.

A preferred vendor is more apt to understand your workflows and tools, making it easier to scale up during product launches or global campaigns. This deep understanding allows for seamless integration and efficient handling of increased volumes from content creation to localization for all your markets.

Leveraging integrated tech stacks, automation, and streamlined workflows expedites the content creation and localization process to achieve accelerated time-to-market.

Reason #6: Strengthen Your Partnership and Strategic Alignment

Building a deep, collaborative vendor relationship with multiple Language Service Providers (LSPs) can be challenging. This fragmented approach often leads to misalignment in strategy and execution, impacting the overall effectiveness of your localization efforts. By consolidating your services with a single partner, you foster a more robust and strategic relationship that benefits both parties.

A single-vendor partnership enables more effective communication and collaboration. With one dedicated team handling all aspects of your content, your partner is more apt to fully understand your business goals, brand values, and market-specific requirements. This deep understanding leads to more precise and effective outcomes, aligning perfectly with your global strategy. The partner can continuously refine and adapt their services to meet your evolving needs, driving continuous improvement and innovation.

Moreover, a strong partnership with a single vendor enhances strategic alignment across all levels of your organization. The vendor can provide valuable insights and recommendations based on their extensive knowledge of your business and the translation, localization, and content creation landscape, leading to recommendations about strategy, emerging markets, the use of AI, and process optimization. This strategic support can help you make informed decisions that drive success in international markets.

Reason #7: Gain Greater Visibility and Control

Maintaining a clear and comprehensive view of all ongoing projects can be difficult when using multiple vendors. This lack of visibility can lead to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and challenges when tracking progress and performance.

With a vendor consolidation strategy that utilizes a single vendor, you benefit from centralized and standardized reporting and analytics, allowing you to monitor and manage all your language-related activities from one unified platform. You get real-time insights into project statuses, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and overall performance metrics all in one place, simplifying decision-making and enabling you to identify and address any issues that may arise quickly.

Reason #8: Increase the Focus on Your Core Business

Adopting a single-vendor approach for your global content needs allows your company to focus more on its core business activities, driving growth and efficiencies.

Managing multiple vendors can significantly distract from your primary business objectives since it involves numerous administrative tasks, coordination efforts, and resource allocations.

By consolidating your content efforts with a single, trusted partner, you can streamline these activities and free up your internal resources. This approach enables your team to concentrate on strategic initiatives directly contributing to your company's growth and market expansion.

Moreover, companies can reinvest cost savings realized through a single-vendor approach into other strategic areas of the business, such as allocating more resources to innovation, marketing, and other initiatives that drive growth and competitive advantage.

By reducing the financial burden associated with a multi-vendor strategy, organizations can optimize their content creation and translation processes and achieve more with their budgets, leading to better overall business performance.

Reason #9: Enhance Data Security and Compliance

Managing one vendor makes monitoring compliance with data protection laws, such as GDPR, easier and reduces the risk of data breaches. With a single vendor handling all your content needs, you have a unified system that ensures consistent application of security protocols and compliance measures. This approach reduces the complexity of managing multiple vendors, each with its own security practices, and provides greater control over how your data is handled and protected.

Reason #10: Eliminate the Need for Cumbersome TMS Management

If you currently use a Translation Management System (TMS) to manage multiple vendors, you can retire the technology if you partner with Lionbridge. Aurora AI, will take its place. Our multilingual and AI-first content platform orchestrates, automates, and optimizes workflows for extraordinary efficiency.

Moreover, we manage the platform, so you no longer have to configure workflows, manage vendor profiles, update Translation Memories (TMs), maintain glossaries, evaluate new features, implement language-specific rules, and fulfill other tasks you are responsible for when using your own TMS.

What else can you expect when you retire your TMS and move to Aurora AI? No more yearly TMS licensing fees. No more internal IT resources that need to be devoted to TMS management. No more budget allocations for system upgrades and maintenance.

Why Partner With Lionbridge for Your Single-Vendor Strategy?

Lionbridge is the right company to consolidate around due to our breadth of offerings — we can do it all — and our ability to be your strategic technology-led partner instead of merely your vendor.

Count on us for all your content needs to create and translate more global content faster and within the same budget. As you transform your business operations, you’ll set yourself up to achieve unprecedented efficiency and accelerated growth.

Our cutting-edge AI-first technology, combined with our 25+ years of experience, is why some of the biggest brands rely on us for tailored multilingual content solutions — and why companies are increasingly moving toward a single-vendor strategy with us.

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Ready to explore a vendor consolidation strategy? Reach out to us today to learn more about our AI-first multilingual content solutions and put your company on a transformational path.