Driving a 75% Reduction in Translation Costs at Ford Motor Company

Meet Ford Motor Company

Ford Motor Company is the second-largest automotive manufacturer in the United States and fifth-largest in the world. Ford’s Finance Division trains and supports more than 5,000 learners globally.

Ford partnered with MadCap Software, formerly Xyleme, in late 2018 to improve and streamline content production and translation processes, beginning with 30 courses in five languages (Chinese, German, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish).

Challenges

Prior to MadCap Software, Ford utilized different course templates and different content production tools, as well as outside tools for developing assessments. This created inconsistencies with layouts, while also driving up costs and production times. 

The manual process of exporting files for translation then re-importing translated content was extremely time consuming and cumbersome. Additionally, the process of creating and distributing assessments was inefficient and negatively impacted the user experience. 

Ford’s Finance Team saw that creation of learning content could be more efficient and cost-effective, using technology to help reimagine translation management. They were specifically focused on streamlining the way they designed, developed and produced translatable learning content, in order to reduce translation time and generate significant cost savings.

Solutions

Improving Efficiency to Drive Time & Cost Savings

Ford’s Finance Department partnered with MadCap Software in late 2018 to improve and streamline content creation and translation management. The content team now creates learning in small, digestible chunks and uses MadCap Create to assemble courses.

Because MadCap Create stores content in flexible XML, it is not tied to presentation, making it easy to export and import only what is needed for translation. As a result, translation can now be completed in a fraction of the time — no manual packaging or un-packaging required. 

As a result, Ford’s Finance Division was able to reduce average translation costs from approximately $2,600 per course, to just $650 per course — a 75% savings, totaling more than $175,000 in the first year alone.  

They also saw significant improvements in translation turnaround times, reducing translation production time from an average of three months per course, to just four-to-six weeks.

“MadCap Software has been a terrific time and cost savings for us,” says Carol Droin, who manages content translation efforts for Ford’s Finance Team. 

“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on all of the courses we’ve built in MadCap Create,” according to Paul Goddard, Learning & Development Manager of Ford’s Finance Division.

Streamlining Content Translation & Localization at Scale

Ford was also able to utilize MadCap Create's built-in interactions and image overlays, providing a substantial cost savings from traditional methods, which required manually editing image files for translation based on each language. With MadCap Create's authoring tool, everything is built-in, so images that contain text are automatically translated with the rest of the content.

“MadCap Create is easy to use & allows us to focus on making the content better,” says Droin. “For me, the savings is perpetual.”

Not only does MadCap Create streamline the translation process, it also supports localization, which allows Ford’s Finance Department to designate specific words or terms as variables and dynamically substitute those words at the point of publishing, while still maintaining a single source of truth. Content can now be tailored to a variety of audience requirements, including unique branding, product names, and cultural context. With MadCap Software, Ford is able to localize content at scale, while also improving the user experience.

Simplifying Assessments & Improving the User Experience

Ford’s Finance L&D team has also seen significant improvement in translation of learning assessments, which is also handled by outside vendors. Historically, this process was inefficient and didn’t deliver the quality of user experience Ford’s Finance Team wanted to provide.

“The process used to be really clunky for the end user to take assessments,” Droin explains. “Now we can bundle it all together with MadCap Create, making it much easier for the end user.”

With MadCap Software, Ford’s Finance Team can easily build assessments with a range of built-in assessment options and question types — drag and drop, multiple choice, bin drop, etc. — seamlessly export them for translation, and deliver them anywhere they need to go.

MadCap Create’s built-in Learning Record Store (LRS) tracks exactly how users interact with each individual piece of content. With MadCap Create’s analytics dashboards, Ford’s Finance Team now has an accurate and objective picture of content engagement and performance, including insight into data by location, department, and region, allowing them to continue to refine their content and drive ongoing improvement.

Ford Motor Company is the second-largest U.S. -based automaker and the fifth-largest in the world. Ford touches the lives of people in every corner of the globe, not just by making and selling the most technologically advanced, reliable and fun-to-drive vehicles in the world, but by leading the way in manufacturing and business innovation. Visit https://www.ford.com/ to learn more.

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