[MUSIC] When you have hundreds or even thousands of freelancers in your database, it may be difficult to find the best ones for a specific project. It's most convenient for project managers to work with those linguists they know well without changing them for several years. But for the company, this may mean that other vendors are simply forgotten, even if they provide better service at a lower cost. To avoid this, an agency needs to constantly attract new vendors and evaluate the active ones on a regular basis. At Palex, we evaluate our vendors constantly, but we learned that there was a flaw in our evaluation system. As it turned out, we evaluated some freelancers too often, while the others were not evaluated at all. Having understood this, we knew that we were not very effective on our evaluation process, and it needed to be changed. What we do now is calculate how many words a linguist translated or edited and how many words were checked and evaluated by us. By dividing the second number by the first one, we get a special indicator, coverage. It shows us what percentage of freelancer's jobs is reviewed by us. By setting a threshold level, let's say five to ten percent, you can easily see whose work and in what volume should be evaluated in the near future. Our translation quality managers regularly monitor these statistics and create a schedule of freelancers evaluation based on it. They're also responsible for holding such evaluations on time. As such, we receive timely and relevant information about the quality of the linguists we work with. In addition to evaluate and translation quality, we collect reviews about the linguists our project managers work with and centralize this information. Based on these reviews, we understand if a freelancer sticks to the set deadlines, if they reply to our requests quickly the times they're available and if there are any issues in communication. In general, project manager reviews show whether it's convenient and easy to work with a certain vendor. Often this is just as important as quality of work. And now for the main question, why do we need all this information? The thinking is that a regular quality assessment of our freelancers' work let us get average quality indices for a specific period of time. Meaning that we can create a list of linguists and sort them based on an average quality index. We can do this once a month, once a quarter, or annually, whatever we need. As such, those linguists that provide the best quality of work at this specific time and not ten years ago, for example, end up at the top of the list. Naturally, we divide this list based on language pairs and large subject matter blocks, or domains, as we call them. This can be IT, life science, industry, and so on. Thanks to this system, we can see right away which of our freelancers are currently providing better quality on medical translations, for example. In addition to quality, we also can see the vendor rates during ranking. We set all rates in one currency, in our case, it's euro, and reflects them in a separate column of the same list. Moreover, we divide the average quality index by the freelancer's rate, calculating the price quality indicator. Using this, we can easily rank all the freelancers in our database. This rating system is closely tied to how projects are allocated to vendors. When we receive a new request from a client, our quality managers choose the recommended people for the project by analyzing the Palex database and classifying the content to be translated. Based on this, project managers contact the recommended freelancers, asking them if they are ready to start working on the project. And then they decide with whom exactly they prefer to cooperate further. In their recommendations, quality managers mostly rely on the freelancer's ranking. The higher the freelancer is in the price quality rating list, the greater the chance that they will be recommended by a quality manager. The same indicator is key when developing and updating project resource lists. We will talk about this a bit later. With that said, quality managers also evaluate what's best for each specific project, price or quality. If a client wants to receive a perfect translation and is willing to pay for it, we will sort the list based on quality indices and not on the price quality coefficient. Our quality managers don't only use ratings when making their recommendation. They also look at the project manager reviews in the system. Even if a linguist is top of the list but doesn't leave on time or only replies to requests several days after they've been sent, it will make a quality manager to think twice before recommending them. In our next lecture, we will discuss how to choose vendors for any specific project. [MUSIC]
