01 September 2020 How Avantpage bootstraps its data science strategy Executives and professionals use data and analytics to make predictions, to enhance optimization, and to improve operations and decision making. As it is constantly growing, it enables businesses to become more data-driven with better insights and knowledge. Why data matters Having visibility in what matters to our customers gives us an opportunity to improve the way we deliver our services. Everything we and our partners do leaves a data trail. This information is then used to optimize processes to increase the overall efficiency of our business. Why does it matter? We believe data is the currency of the future. Harnessing data enables us to craft proactive solutions of value, to stay relevant and aligned with our customers, to maximize our cross-functional team’s time and to have intelligible insights, better planning, and forecasting. The types of data that affect change  Like many organizations operating in today’s metrics-driven environment, data is key to justify a business case. Data enables us to gain visibility to the unknown. By soliciting and capturing the right information, we are able to anticipate the workload, the type of project requests, the language distribution before engaging in a conversation with our clients. We reduce risks by systematically tracking our on-time delivery records. Our teams consistently strive to increase efficiency gains through better and more effective processes, leveraging translation memory best practices to shorten delivery cycles and increase quality. Supporting the compliance needs of our clients, listening to how they want to see their data being reported, and ensuring their files and projects are managed according to their regulatory guidelines, helps us to build stronger partnerships.  Such information helps us to be relevant, to communicate effectively to our partners and to help them with their needs. It also provides us with insights into relationships that can be used to improve our business decision making. It transforms the way we do business and drives innovation.  What do we do with data We needed a solid foundation, infrastructure, and processes to utilize the data we garnered, so we created AvantData. It was developed and implemented internally based on the cost-effective but highly skilled talents of our Systems Team. Our leadership team is invested and committed to its success, and the members have been instrumental in its inception and on-going development. Our first applications focused on creating dashboards for internal information, workflows for project optimization, and a portal to service our customers. Efficiency, productivity, and sense of urgency are some of our strengths and we were able to optimize them by leveraging AvantData. For example, thanks to the data, we were able to systematize our projects with optimized workflows. Our system is prompted every 10 minutes, it triggers the creation of a new workflow, automatically builds a project, retrieves its files and notifies the relevant teams.  Our teams leverage AvantData’s insights for decision making and planning. We focus on areas that add the most value for our customers as well as for our business. Using data to understand trends at the client level allows us to foresee peaks in project requests and scale accordingly. AvantData also empowers our employee career paths and opportunities. Finally, it helps to organize our data for a future AI implementation roadmap.  Gathering and managing data is essential to our productivity, customer relevance, and sales effectiveness. A data science strategy requires resources, expertise, and financial investment but it is essential for a company of any size. We find that people, processes, and technology can be combined powerfully, even within a small structure like ours.