Wednesday, August 5, 2009

QUALITY, QUALITY...

I'm frequently told that the MT industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand there is the demand for accuracy and stringent quality assurance, while on the other is the ubiquitous pressure of the TAT (turn around time). Clients seem to always be pushing us to deliver the files sooner and/or trending towards increasing the proportion of the workload that comes in with 'ASAP' or even 'STAT' tags.

I tell my clients that if they want a job done 'stat' i.e. within 4 hours, then they will pay me a double time bonus on those lines. ASAP files (delivery in 12 hours) will cost them time and a half. Automatically, the number of stats drops. There was a time when we used to not charge extra for the urgent work. But in those days, the proportion of such work was only 1.5% of the total.

Clients will sometimes openly tell us that they are facing competition from other companies who tout a maximum TAT of only 12 or even 8 hours. I always advise these clients to give such 'competitors' a try. Needless to say we have never lost a client yet.

The secret is simple - QUALITY. Quality requires skill, good organization, and time to properly do all three levels of processing. Quality can not be maintained if one is in a rush to deliver. You need to have good MTs in sufficient numbers, Editors who are delivering blanks-only uploadable quality (>99.5%) and and QAs to run the final checks, see that the templates are followed, and bust those last few blanks/doubts. We deliver excellent quality by fully utilizing our 24 hour TAT, and our clients are very happy with our work!

As we keep raising our quality standards, our workload will automatically increase... How I wish that were true of the industry at large!

Deliver quality in a reasonable timeframe and you will get the good clients, those who pay well and pay on time, AND who will value the work that you do for them.

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