Lionbridge Technologies accelerates scalability with EZOfficeInventory

Company Overview: Lionbridge Technologies

Lionbridge Technologies is a leading technology company based in Waltham, Massachusetts with operations in over 23 countries. It provides AI-based translation and localization services to market products faster and better, and helps companies adapt their products to local markets.

It is a market leader in AI and technology, particularly distinguished for translating video games into 350+ local languages to enhance user accessibility, and streamlining the process of releasing game versions to multiple markets. With a focus on the end-cycle of game development, the company also fixes game bugs to provide high quality player experience. From testing games for errors to helping improve audio and visual experience for players, Lionbridge has it all covered.

From homegrown system to EZOfficeInventory: Challenges in asset management

The inventory supervisor at Lionbridge Technologies, Marcin Farkowski, highlighted the company’s need to adopt an advanced, scalable solution for managing its assets.

He said, “We were using homegrown software first, only in some locations, but it was not scalable and it was hard to manage a lot of assets.”

Historically, Lionbridge has managed a wide variety of assets, including lockers and IT equipment used by employees, as well as hardware for game enhancement. Day to day operations also required close tracking of assets across multiple physical locations. Before adopting EZOfficeInventory, Lionbridge encountered major challenges in handling their inventory and assets.

The team was handling most of its equipment through a locally developed software package that did not allow them to manage assets in large quantities, and also lacked scalability. This lack of control led to missing assets and operational inefficiencies. As the company expanded its presence across several additional locations, the team identified the need to choose a solution that could help them efficiently manage a wider variety of assets.

Unreliable inventory management was one of the major challenges faced by Lionbridge. Joseph Ekeng, project manager inventory, noticed that every time someone required assets for a new project, it was difficult to determine assets’ availability and quantity. While employees checked out assets for projects to work from home, the company did not have a solution to track them and identify the quantity utilized. This yielded an overstock of items, leaving the company with unused equipment, adding to its inventory costs

Another challenge of inefficient equipment management was the resulting inadequate utilization of warehouse space and lack of usable equipment. With unavailability of a solution to track assets’ life cycle, the team also faced under-maintained and outdated equipment, leading to more frequent downtimes and equipment malfunctions. These issues were quite disruptive to operations and impeded Lionbridge’s overall mission.

Moving towards higher efficiency and scalability through EZOfficeInventory

Marcin highlighted that after exhaustive online research, they concluded that EZOfficeInventory was the best technological solution to reduce their costs and track assets.

Lionbridge leverages several EZOfficeInventory features that have helped the company considerably in reducing costs and improving customer service.

“We use EZofficeInventory to quickly respond to client needs and save costs due to reduction in unnecessary equipment purchases,” said Marcin.

Further, the system enables the company to securely track assets, generate customized reports, schedule asset maintenance and check in/check out assets in a much more timely fashion. Most importantly, Lionbridge is able to assign unique roles to users based on different levels and departments by using EZOfficeInventory’s “custom roles” feature. Custom roles enables employees to manage assets based on their departmental role, improving workflows and ensuring that sensitive data is kept confidential and safe.

Here are the key features of EZOfficeInventory that allow Lionbridge to remotely manage their asset landscape:

Seamless asset tracking

One of the issues faced by Lionbridge initially was the inability to track equipment checked out by employees for remote projects. The ability to check in and check out assets has helped the team easily monitor asset utilization and ownership. Real-time tracking offers instant access to the location, assignee and quantity of each checked out asset.

With a cloud-based solution, multiple users can log in simultaneously to check the location of assets pertaining to their relevant departments. This has made it easier for inventory managers to see whether items are available to be checked out to employees for specific projects. With EZOfficeInventory, Lionbridge has experienced reduction in processing times, and enhanced visibility into the assets. Another key feature, history tracking, has enabled the team to maintain a trail of assets and ensure they were not stolen, misplaced or simply unreturned. With robust asset tracking in place, if an asset appears to be missing, they can easily trace ownership and enforce handling policies.

Minimized loss of items

Joseph, who manages assets at Lionbridge said, “We are using EZOfficeInventory to solve problems like secure tracking. We found that with EZOfficeInventory it will be easier and intuitive to remotely control the tracking of our assets”.

Secure, simplified asset tracking has significantly reduced the loss of assets because the system records every checkout and notifies the administrator of the action. Lionbridge also conducts regular audits to reanalyze the state of its assets, and conducting audits from various locations has been greatly simplified because multiple audits’ information can be synced together via the cloud. This has benefited the company’s overall efficiency because it enables cross-checking of physical audit numbers with details in the system, as well as ensuring they never turn away a customer due to equipment unavailability.

Joseph sums this up, “It's hard for anything to get lost because we use EZOfficeInventory.”

Customized reports

The main KPIs for Lionbridge are reduction in costs and time associated with equipment handling, and expediting its workflows. EZOfficeInventory has enabled the company to achieve these aims through advanced features like custom reports. With this feature, the team can generate separate reports for checked out items, reservations and available items. This provides the company access to detailed information about assets at all times so that it can cross-check their availability for each new project. It also generates reports for specific items, such as gaming and admin PCs, for targeted asset use.

Further, these reports allow the Lionbridge staff to present detailed records with quantifiable data to internal stakeholders. This helps improve forecasts for Lionbridge regarding equipment procurement, reducing operational costs.

The value in EZOfficeInventory

Lionbridge’s service business operates in a competitive industry and relies on up-to-date and well-maintained assets to quickly respond to customer needs. EZOfficeInventory has made it possible to provide quality service while improving Lionbridge’s overall operational efficiency. Further, the Lionbridge team has noticed an increase in customer satisfaction as they now easily avoid service missteps that were previously brought on by asset mismanagement.

Using the platform, Lionbridge has developed consistent workflows and agile internal operations. With automatic processes, the administration never loses sight of high-value assets, receives timely alerts in case asset location has been changed, and maintains a trail of custodianship. Marcin and Joseph both agree that the company is excited about using EZOfficeInventory into the future because it has helped them to address their key administrative challenges successfully.