TransPerfect is a global leader in translation services, helping to bridge language gaps and connect cultures. Founded in a dorm room in 1992, the company has grown by leaps and bounds over the years, largely due to a long and often complex series of acquisitions.
By the time the company celebrated its 30th year in business, its org chart was beginning to look more like a sprawling family tree. Though TransPerfect’s mission is ensuring clear communication across the globe, they were struggling to easily articulate the relationships between their own various entities.
Tae Koo, a Compliance Analyst for TransPerfect, had a relationship with aACE Software’s President, Michael Bethuy, and VP of Product Development, Brian Voll, that went back decades. While TransPerfect had little in common with most typical aACE customers, Tae trusted the team at aACEsoft to customize their solution in a way that would fit TransPerfect’s exceptional requirements. Brian and his team of developers quickly got to work. They knew the results fit the bill when they got the following email from Tae:
“I want to thank you guys for making me look good,” he wrote. “I just got an award for getting [aACE] implemented.”
What did aACE do that was so impressive to TransPerfect’s executive team? Read on to find out.
A Solution Tailored for Non-Linear Growth
Over the last 30 years, TransPerfect has grown from a 2-person operation run out of a dorm room to a multinational company with over 140 locations worldwide. The story of how they got there is anything but a straight line.
In order to branch out into new territories, TransPerfect purchased existing translation businesses in their target markets. These companies would then acquire additional companies, which could themselves turn around and buy more companies. Complicating matters even further, some of TransPerfect’s subsidiaries are jointly owned by one or more of TransPerfect’s other subsidiaries. The result is an org chart that looks more like a web than an umbrella.
Keeping track of all that internally was one thing, but explaining it to outsiders like banks and government agencies was becoming increasingly difficult. Most CRM solutions aren’t built to handle the level of complexity present in TransPerfect’s business relationships. Luckily Tae remembered his old friends Michael and Brian, and knew that if anyone could accommodate his company’s needs, it was them.
“With so many entities and different layers, it’s easy to lose track of where you are” in the overall organizational structure, Tae explains. “aACE built out those parent-child relationships in a way that lets us quickly see who the parent company is of a given entity. There’s even a chart as a visual aid to show how everything relates.”
A custom “Ownership” field in the Companies module allows TransPerfect to easily link multiple parent companies to each Company record. A “Percentage” field also enables users to quickly see exactly how much of a stake each parent company has in a particular child company.
This simplifies processes like handing over documentation to a bank, for example, or a government agency. “It’s been a great help in terms of putting those org charts together,” Tae says. “When we’re talking about a given entity, they want to see who the ultimate owner is.” aACE makes it easy to track a company’s ownership at a glance, even in cases where that structure may be several layers deep.
Sharing Contacts and Companies Across Multiple Entities
“TransPerfect is the largest translation company in the world,” Tae explains. “We do a lot of different things, like translating textbooks, translating movies, subtitling, and things like that. So we have a lot of different entities, and those entities have different offices. In the U.S., for example, we have about 50 different entities with over a hundred offices. Where that gets complicated is that certain offices may share accountants, lawyers, vendors or things like that. Trying to track that individually by company and location can become a little cumbersome.”
aACE already had robust tools for tracking complex business relationships. Brian and his team used that as a starting point to create a Companies module that could support a much deeper and more flexible infrastructure. aACE’s out-of-the-box Linked Companies feature enables TransPerfect to create Company records for vendors such as accountants or lawyers, which can be linked to multiple subsidiaries at once. This prevents them from having to create duplicate records in order to have, for example, a single lawyer connected to three different entities.
“Keeping track of an accountant in a Rolodex is easy when you’re in one location,” Tae explains. “But when you start to grow and you have multiple accountants, and some of those accountants might be serving several locations, it gets more complicated. If you change accountants, you have to replace them wholesale through all of the locations that the accountant was servicing.”
In TransPerfect’s previous system, that required updating multiple spreadsheets. “That led to a lot of human error,” Tae recalls. Someone might update the accountant for one location without realizing that person also served other entities because it was all so hard to track. “I spent a great deal of time trying to track down, for instance, our accountant in Singapore,” Tae explains. “I’d be going through multiple spreadsheets and finding one accountant here and another one there, not knowing which one to use. So I had to track them all down. Sometimes I’d get lucky and find the correct one on the first try. But sometimes I wasn’t so lucky, and it would take a while to figure it out.”
“aACE makes it a lot easier to update things like that,” he adds. “We just replace the old accountant with the new one.” Because they can see at a glance which Company records were linked to the old accountant, there’s no more guessing games.
Managing Shared Accounting Functions
In addition to sharing external resources like lawyers and accountants, some of TransPerfect’s subsidiaries share internal resources such as bank accounts. Bank account information was maintained in an existing accounting system. Some aACE users who didn’t require full access to the accounting solution did however need access to bank account details. To address this, the aACEsoft team implemented an integration between aACE and the accounting system. This allowed the aACEsoft team to display bank account details from the accounting system within the aACE Company detail view.
“Certain bank accounts are shared, whereas others are just for one entity, so there’s a lot of additional information there that wasn’t readily available in the way we used to track things,” Tae says. “So we customized aACE to work with the accounting system, in terms of providing the necessary information to those of us responsible for working with the banks.”
This customization required a little bit of thinking outside the box for the aACEsoft team. “Even though the Bank Accounts module is green, which normally indicates that it’s an Accounting module, here we have it sitting on top of the Companies module,” explains Brian Voll. “Similarly to the way things like accountants and lawyers work in the CRM system, TransPerfect can have one bank account that’s linked to seven different entities, and another that’s linked to twelve different entities, and so on. And then there are the banks in France that are associated with the French entities versus banks in Spain that are associated with the Spanish entities. So rather than taking the customization we already did in the Companies module and rebuilding it in the GL Accounts module, we chose to create a new record type in Companies that uses the same infrastructure we already put in place.”
In addition to saving development time from not having to recustomize those fields in another module, this approach also provided another benefit: TransPerfect’s users can see at a glance which contacts are associated with which bank accounts. When questions arise, this enables them to easily reach the right person without wasting time.
A Browser-Based Solution Accessible Everywhere
After dealing with the inconsistencies that come with running a business on spreadsheets, Tae appreciates aACE’s reliability. “I can’t think of another way to put it: It’s our source of truth,” he says. “If something’s updated in the database, we know it should be correct. And everyone has access to it. Whereas if you have multiple spreadsheets, one person’s file may be correct while someone else’s is out of date.”
aACE puts everyone on the same page, eliminating the time spent on chasing down information and checking various spreadsheets against each other. And because TransPerfect is using aACE in the browser, their team can access it from anywhere – important for a company with offices around the world. “It’s nice that you can access it no matter where you are, rather than having to be at a specific computer on a specific network,” Tae says.
And it’s not just international staff who benefit from that portability. Recently, a flood in one of TransPerfect’s offices forced some previously on-site employees to begin temporarily working from home. aACE’s browser-based option meant that they had one fewer disruption to deal with during the emergency.
In Their Own Words
Here’s how Tae Koo, TransPerfect’s Compliance Analyst, describes his company’s aACE implementation:
“It’s been a very positive experience. I was very happy with the overall results. The aACEsoft team has always been very responsive, which I’m happy about.
“Of course I’ve had positive experiences with Michael and Brian in the past, which is why I recommended them to my management team. It was because of that trust in them that I knew they’d be able to translate our requirements into a functional solution. And oftentimes, Brian will come up with a different way of meeting a requirement that will work even better than what I envisioned.
“Ideally aACE makes sense for production, but it can be adapted for services like what we’re doing. It’s a process, right? There are a lot of similarities between creating a design, for example, and producing an actual physical product. There are a lot of industries I would recommend it to.”
Interested in learning more about what aACE can do for your SMB? Read our Feature Highlights to see how aACE can help you take your operations to the next level.
