Signed, sealed and delivered

Every day millions of items are shipped around the world. Pallets of goods criss-cross Europe by road, rail, air and water in the care of transport companies. Orchestrating and monitoring this process needs a powerful logistics tool. One of the leading software solutions on the market is LBASE from Imtech ICT Logistics Software.

Originally developed by German speaking experts in Austria, this package is used right across Europe and beyond, to manage the entire internal organisation of a business – from receipt of an order to the issuing of an invoice – in one integrated system. To become as successful as it is, this solution needed to be accessible in other languages.

“German is very widely used in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but the international language is English,” admits Michael Beck, Imtech’s Strategy Manager. “We first translated into English ten, or more, years ago. We now translate into French, Italian and Spanish.”

In a environment where one shipment may pass through several countries, having the user interface, operator instructions, on-line help centre, business reports and documentation in local languages makes the software all the more powerful. Finding the right translation partner was an important step.

“We compared other translation companies. Looking at the results, how they used the language of our industrial sector, McFelder had a very accurate price-performance-ratio. They were very professional but unbureaucratic and fast (just-in-time).”

McFelder Translations director, Fiona McCrae, understands this and always assigns degree-qualified native translators with specific logistics expertise to Imtech’s projects. “In addition, the translators are highly qualified in the IT aspects of the assignment since they need to work with very complex file formats which can be imported into Imtech’s IT platform.”

This attention to detail is appreciated, as Michael says: “We get good results that we can trust: only small random checks are necessary.”

He adds: “We have to fulfil the customer needs and expectations of good quality. We are not native English speakers so we need a very good translation partner. The result [of our collaboration with McFelder] is we have the high quality translations we need for our customers.”