Following continued growth in the field of translations for regulatory affairs and clinical research, DWL is re-organising its departments to nurture its core business and develop new capabilities.
Established in 1962, Dora Wirth (Languages) Ltd. maintains a strong reputation as a translation provider to the life science industries, as shown in our annual customer satisfaction survey. It’s thanks to business from these customers that we have experienced continued growth over the past three years.
Company revenue has also grown steadily thanks to in-house expertise in our core specialisms: regulatory affairs and clinical research. We expect our business to remain strong going into 2021, despite the economic impacts affecting other verticals. In order to meet this growing demand, and maintain our commitment to high-quality services, we have decided to restructure our company starting October 2020.
There are three key aspects of the restructuring that will contribute to our ongoing success:
- Creation of three Business Units to address important areas of our business:
– Establishing a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) service
– Developing our existing customer base of Medical Devices customers
– Growing our Business Development department - Appointment of additional Board Members with responsibilities in:
– Business Development
– Technology - Refreshing DWL’s system of Key Account Management to ensure that all our key customer accounts continue to benefit from a single point of contact at all stages of the translation process.
Of paramount importance during this re-organisation was the safeguarding of our core business in translations for regulatory affairs and clinical research. Thus far, its success has been due to high quality translations and dedicated project management teams.
To protect this part of our business, we have redistributed many of our customer accounts and set up a more fluid reporting structure to avoid bottlenecks in project management. The restructuring will also strengthen the communication between our PM teams, and our Medical Director and QC Director who bring expertise in medical matters and quality control.
NMT
NMT is a buzzword in the translation industry and its development over the last few years means that the output of Machine Translation engines today is of high enough quality to be adopted across many industries.
Life Sciences is, to some extent, a final frontier for this exciting technology, and DWL aims to deploy appropriate NMT solutions to support the experience and accuracy of our supply chain of human translators, revisers, desktop publishing (DTP) providers and other language experts.
Medical Devices
The translation of medical device documentation requires a combination of expert translators and skilled DTP providers to support our clients’ success in a highly competitive landscape. We are pleased to have served the medical devices industry for many years. With the upcoming Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and In-Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR), growth will come from translating essential documents required to market devices in Europe.
Thanks to the quality of project managers at DWL, and relatively low staff turnover, we have a depth of subject matter expertise that has enabled us to be directly involved in the development and marketing drugs and devices.
Business Development
Growth also comes from our loyal base of customers, whose accounts we have nurtured over the years. Some of these relationships emerged through recommendations, with word-of-mouth still valuable in an industry where contracts are frequent and reputations are at stake. With the appointment of Business Development Director, Eleni Andreou, we aim to give greater focus to our marketing funnel and welcome customers who seek a highly efficient and competitive translation service.
Key Account Management
DWL’s strategy is to offer a single point of contact to each customer. This ensures a consistent approach to quality with every translation request, and a depth of knowledge in the products, processes and preferences of each our clients. Each of the newly created Business Units will provide support across their key accounts to ensure continuity and cover during busy periods while retaining the personal approach preferred by our customers.
Our list of key Customer accounts is reviewed at regular intervals so that all our clients receive the tailored service they expect from a specialist Language Service Provider (LSP).
Technology
DWL has been around long enough to remember writing up translations on a typewriter and sending translated medical papers by snail-mail. However, over the years we have been proactive and selective about adopting technology solutions to improve the consistency and quality of our translations, as well as to automate aspects of the project management process. The appointment of our Technology Director will strengthen our ability to test and tailor any developments in technology to help us to grow and remain competitive in our specialist field of translation.
