How Indeavor saves on time and translation expenses with Lokalise

About Indeavor

Indeavor is an industry-leading workforce management and employee scheduling software company. It offers cloud-based labor scheduling solutions to companies in various verticals, including energy, manufacturing, public service, and others, with 24/7 work environments that rely on complex employee schedules. 

Indeavor's software is used by some of the world's leading private and public organizations, such as PepsiCo, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Kellogg's, and more. Their software is available in 13 languages, and this number keeps growing thanks to localization.

Lokalise sat down to talk to Sylvia Taube, a senior product manager at Indeavor. She helps design and drive the company's product forward and manages the localization workflow. 

Waving goodbye to cumbersome manual localization workflows

Currently, Indeavor localizes its cloud-based scheduling software and a few ancillary products such as mobile and web apps. Before using Lokalise, the company outsourced localization tasks to a translations bureau and other vendors, but the old workflow was neither effective nor sustainable. 

Sylvia says that dealing with product localization management is a relatively new addition to her workload. Some time ago, her supervisor assigned her a new task to “figure out a few translations,” and that's when Sylvia came face to face with how cumbersome translations were through the existing manual processes. 

Indeavor carried out its translation and localization processes manually – files were sent to a translation agency via email, then Indeavor's development team manually created new translation keys. As a result, the localization lead time was long, the translation memory was poor, and the process was often hampered by human error, with files getting lost or misplaced.

“It was very cumbersome not only for the person requesting translations but also for our development team,” says Sylvia.

Being an employee with considerable experience in both Indeavor's product and project management, Sylvia immediately decided to find a more efficient way to manage the translation and localization processes to support the company's growth.

A quest for the best localization management system

Sylvia began to explore various localization management tool demos. Not long after her search began, Sylvia identified Lokalise as the best fit for Indeavor's needs – the tool promised to ease the localization workflow through automation and, thus, reduce the risk of human error. 

Asked about the main criteria she used to pick the winner, Sylvia reveals her priorities:

• Integration with GitLab (this was a must-have)
• Easy to use and navigate
• Ease of editing and visual representation

“I didn't have much time to learn how to use new tools. I needed a quick and appealing solution for our localization process issues. Lokalise ticked all the main boxes, so I decided to go for it.”

Sylvia adds that currently she's the sole person dealing with localization management at Indeavor. While she's looking forward to having a dedicated localization team, using Lokalise has already made an enormous difference for her and all the others involved, especially the development team.

“Before Lokalise, it took developers at least half a day to manage the translations and add new keys, whereas, with Lokalise in place, they spend about 80–90% less time on the same tasks.” 

Saving hours and nerves

Asked about any third-party Lokalise integrations that Indeavor's team uses, Sylvia highlights the integration with GitLab. It significantly eases requesting new translations and receiving the completed files for the development team.

“Not being the bottleneck of all translation and localization-related things is great. Developers don't have to wait until I manually send them the prepared files as they can access them via the GitLab integration.”

Sylvia tells us that the company has added six new languages to its software in the last six months, thanks to Lokalise. Without Lokalise in place, managing those translations would've been a lot more complicated and time-consuming.

Sylvia also says that before using Lokalise, Indeavor's most significant issue was the long lead time. She would send a language file to a translation company, and by the time Sylvia received the translated version, some translation keys were already changed, or new ones were added, so the files didn't match, causing even more manual work.

“Lokalise has taken away a large chunk of manual and time-consuming work. I can personally tell that with Lokalise in place, managing localization tasks takes up about 1–5% of my work hours, while previously they occupied significantly more than that.”

Reduced translation costs

Neither Sylvia nor the Indeavor development team see themselves returning to the manual localization management process. Moreover, Sylvia praises Lokalise's customer support and says she highly values the pleasant interactions with the helpful team. 

Another way Lokalise has benefited the Indeavor's team is through the ability to “clean up” translation key duplicates. Lokalise's duplicate finder, which enables automated key cleaning, adds more quality to Indeavor's product and saves the company translation costs. 

“We found out that we've had the word 'yes' translated 180 times. It's bizarre that we used to pay 180 times whatever the language value was just because of that. And there were many more similar cases for us.”

Sylvia adds that Indeavor can't grasp all of the cost savings just yet as their experience with Lokalise is relatively new, but she can already see substantial time-saving benefits.

“Lokalise is now our single source of truth in the localization process. The tool has added a lot of ease to our workflow, which was previously too complex and inefficient. Lokalise does everything we need it to do.”