How to Structure Your Vendor Management Strategy

Report written by Valeria Nanni.

We’ve already seen that there are a number of different ways of setting up a language team. It’s rare nowadays to find enterprises opting for a fully in-house translation team, and companies typically go with either a hybrid model with some in-house language capabilities or simply forgo internal language resources altogether. This means that, broadly speaking, companies have at least one external language partner. What tends to happen in this situation is that, while everyone is busy with day-to-day tasks, vendor management often gets pushed to the bottom of the barrel or is forgotten about altogether.

Why focus on vendor management

Having a well-oiled vendor management setup is vital to the success of your localization program, as it ultimately means getting high-quality translated content within established turnaround times using standardized, efficient, measurable workflows, all while keeping costs in check. Vendor management can certainly be a balancing act that requires attention and adjustments over time and, as is often the case, there’s no right or wrong way to approach this space. What a successful model looks like can vary greatly from one company to the next so we’ve prepared a few guidelines to help you put together your very own vendor management strategy.

How to structure your vendor management strategy

If you’ve been in the industry for a while now you might’ve come across the Localization Maturity Model at some point in your career. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s a standard framework that uses different levels to help you understand how mature the localization program in your organization is. It can also be very helpful for visualizing your ideal state and offers a great way of tracking progress towards reaching a more advanced level.

This report has been researched and written by Valeria Nanni, Nimdzi's Localization Specialist. If you wish to learn more about the topic of vendor management, reach out to Valeria at valeria.nanni@nimdzi.com.