Welocalize centralizes and organizes data, making asynchronous collaboration a breeze

Today, more than ever, businesses are expected to understand the cultural, linguistic, and contextual nuances of a target audience and make sure that their content resonates with local customs and expectations. That’s where localization—and its long-time champion, Welocalize—come in. Welocalize leverages state-of-the-art AI technologies such as machine translation engines, large language models, and natural language processing to automate translations for its global customers, at scale. This technology, combined with configurable workflows and an extensive network of over 250,000 linguistic experts in more than 250 languages, allows Welocalize to transform its customers’ global content to drive stronger customer engagement. “By localizing global content quickly and efficiently for our customers, in whatever language they want, we’re helping them to increase customer engagement, which ultimately drives stronger business outcomes,” says Laura Speltz, Client Services Director at Welocalize.

A complex web of global teams and projects

With a team spread across all time zones, Welocalize requires comprehensive solutions for collaboration and project management. “We need to manage a high volume of activities, timelines, and projects every day,” explains Speltz. “We’re always looking for ways to automate tasks so that we can give our teams the ability to work faster and more efficiently and eliminate human error. This lets us scale faster.”

In 2022, Welocalize became the leading localization and language services provider (LSP) for Smartsheet. 

“Our project managers want to deeply understand the customers we work with, including their products and services. In support of that business philosophy, we decided to try the product ourselves” shares Speltz.

Centralizing, automating, and organizing information

Project managers at the company started using Smartsheet to track everything from project schedules to client engagement. A shared WorkApp brings together sheets, reports, assigned tasks, financial data, and performance metrics for a specific account. Dynamic View, custom widgets, and dashboards help organize key information. “Instead of sending emails back and forth, our team members can preview real-time updates for each project,” explains Alejandro De Luca, Senior Project Manager at Welocalize.

Welocalize automates as many steps as possible to save time. Instead of setting projects up manually, Welocalize automatically sets up a project in Smartsheet that is visible to everyone. If either side has a question, they use Smartsheet’s Conversations panel to follow up. “Setting up a project is one of the most time-consuming tasks. So, automating this process frees us up for more important work,” explains Amanda Rivera, Senior Project Manager at Welocalize. “Before, we’d need to prepare files and email back and forth. It would take us around one day to kick off a project. Now, we can do it within a couple of hours. We have removed a lot of emails from the equation thanks to Smartsheet.”

More visibility, easier collaboration

Now that information is centralized and well organized, Welocalize project managers have better visibility into all phases of a project. 

“It is often hard to visualize complex project timelines. Smartsheet provides great visuals to help us see dependencies and milestones,” shares Speltz. “We can more easily oversee all steps and responsible parties. This enables each project manager to save an hour every day.”

This added visibility also makes it easier to collaborate. As a global team, Welocalize employees often work asynchronously. 

“When I complete my day, someone can pick up where I left off in a different timezone,” explains Rivera. “They don’t need to dig for the information or ask around—everything’s recorded in one place.” 

Team members often view version history to catch up. Each task has an assigned owner, urgency level, progress status, and creation date, making it easier to triage. “As opposed to a regular spreadsheet with a classic view, we can do so much in Smartsheet—have a conversation, organize and update tasks, and gain clarity,” Rivera adds.

Finding new ways to make life easier

Welocalize is currently exploring new workflows that can be migrated into Smartsheet. “We could make our work more efficient and visible if we moved all of these small sheets into a master tracker with different views, timelines, and projects,” says De Luca.

Speltz expects to see more Welocalize employees adopt Smartsheet. “I often receive requests for licenses from team members,” she shares. “I’m sure we’ll grow not only in the number of users but also in the number of functions we leverage. We’ll always be asking the same question: how else can I make life easier for myself and the rest of my team?”