ELIA ND Bucharest 2017 – In Review

And off we went…

Destination: Bucharest, Romania

Purpose: ELIA’s 21^st Networking Days

… an opportunity to meet with friends and partners from around the globe, share insights and pick the minds of peers on industry trends.

With six tracks in just two days, and as many as 22 presentations, this was yet another inspiring and thought-provoking event.

What impressed us was Andrej Nedoma’s presentation on KPIs, goals and incentives, who explained how we can turn most challenges that many of us – LSCs – face into key performance indicators and how in this way we can resolve very common-place issues. He made it sound easy enough, but let’s see what happens when we put it in practice (more to follow on our progress with that, and possibly some pics as well).

Another interesting session on the technology spectrum was the presentation of the TILDE team, Rihards Kalnins and Didzis Klavins, who shared valuable figures and graphs on how MT has come to impact the localization industry and how feeding an MT engine with clear data can drive performance to unprecedented levels. Did you know that with well set-up and trained MT engines per field, and the use of account-specific terminology glossaries, you can increase the productivity of your translators by 150%?

Moving on to People Power, Annette Lawlor touched upon a rather painful aspect of our industry and that is talent shortage. Is it really that we are lacking talented people or could it possibly be that we are either too picky or not looking in the right direction? Maybe if we tried to engage with the candidates we are interested in through motivating job ads instead of boring and impersonal job specs, we would be more successful in finding better matches for our companies and our teams.

A session that ignited passions and heated discussion was Laurentiu Constantin’s about the relevance of Single Language Vendors in today’s translation chain – are they obsolete as the model of MLVs working directly with freelancers (amongst others) is gaining acceptance? No definite answer was given as the session also pondered upon the eternal question: Grow or Die?

A double session on SEO and Digital Marketing for LSPs shed (a lot of) light on the science behind Internet/search rankings. Especially Chris Raulf demonstrated how Google treats our lives and businesses and lots of hints, tips and tricks were shared to be used immediately by our IT people (say who? – most LSPs admitted during the UnSession that they are outsourcing IT management and administration 😊).

Two sessions that were particularly interesting for Project Managers were Lena Sarbacher’s session on Project management and Christopher Carter’s session on Gross profit margin. Lena talked about the number of roles a Project Manager should adopt and the complexities of today’s disrupting reality, and shared some interesting tips from her personal practice on how to control the complex and dynamic environments on a long-term basis and communicate better with teams and clients. At the end of her presentation Lena shared a very interesting check list to help make motivation and improvement an ongoing everyday process. Chris presented a detailed case study on how to increase margin by providing a detailed step-by-step guide and tools that would help companies achieve their goals through detailed measures of every small or big aspect of the business and shared some ideas on how to measure change in staff’s behavior.

To sum it up, this year’s edition of the Networking days was all about ideas, meeting old and new industry peers and gaining a lot of new knowledge. We enjoyed it thoroughly and can’t wait until next year’s event in Vienna!