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Bundling

If you are implementing the Project Ingestion use case and not the BMS Integration use case, you will not need to develop anything around bundling - however, it may be reassuring to know that the unit of the integration (e.g. each file, each string, each assignment, etc.) does not matter. You can always create one opportunity, even for your most granular unit, and bundling will allow the project managers to register and track a combined, bigger unit.

Different systems that BeLazy supports are very different in structure. For example, a Plunet vendor portal will give you an assignment that instructs you to do translation with potentially many files that you need to download, and when ready, upload the translated set of files. If you need to perform translation and proofreading on 50 XML files in two target languages for a customer using Plunet, you will get four assignments (one per target language per workflow step) with 50 files included. Plunet does not check on delivery whether you uploaded an equivalent to each file. In some translation management systems, each file can be assigned to different people, and needs to be claimed and delivered separately. The same task for a user of Worldserver, for example, will be 200 assignments - one per file per target language per workflow step.

While similarly to Plunet, most vendor portals offer single-step jobs as assignments, translation management systems are different: some may offer bilingual assignments, others multilingual, some may allow you to accept each file separately, some only together. Translation management systems also have different user types, for example if you are an administrator, you may see every project together. If you are a vendor to another company in the same system, possibly the unit of assignment you see is per file per language per workflow step.

It is a challenge for the integration platform how the different assignments coming from different systems are then turned into meaningful business management system concepts that project managers can work with. As described before, BeLazy works with the concept of three levels when it comes to integrating with business management systems: projects, tasks and jobs. Tasks are the unit of monitoring, and normally every task is a series of jobs which can be individually assigned to single entities in the workflow.

In BeLazy, such an assignment, or unit of work you receive from the other systems, is referred to as an opportunity, because when somebody assigns work to you, you have the opportunity to take it or leave it. The BMS representation is only generated during the mapping, and that is when BeLazy decides which opportunity becomes a new BMS project, which one becomes a new task in a BMS project, and which one is added to a job in the BMS task.

Opportunities are represented on two levels: opportunity (one line on the interface) and pricing item (if you expand the opportunity on the interface, you'll sometimes see multiple lines at the bottom - those are the pricing items). An opportunity, which on the user interface is an individual line that appears under Approvals pending, is a unit of acceptance. In most systems this is the smallest part of an assignment offered to you that can be accepted or rejected. Some systems support acceptance or rejection of an opportunity, but not all of them do - for example, if you are working against your own TMS instance, acceptance makes no sense. Pricing items are the unit of reassignment and delivery.

Using the mapping rules that you configure on the user interface, you decide how you convert this information into BMS projects - projects, tasks, and jobs.

Bundling is the concept that allows you to do basically the following:

  • Take multiple bilingual opportunities and merge them into one business management system project with multiple target languages. You may want to store an English-French and an English-Chinese project in a single business management system project with two languages, creating two bilingual tasks.

  • Create daily or weekly or monthly projects in business management systems, and add every new batch as tasks (or even jobs) into the same project.

  • Take different types of opportunities belonging to the same task and add them to different jobs in the same BMS task. For example, you always receive translation and review, but as two separate vendor portal assignments. You want to merge this into one workflow, one task with two jobs or steps, linking translation to the first step and linking review to the second.

In all these cases you combine multiple BeLazy opportunities into one BMS project. However, the first two are bundling projects into tasks, whereas the third example bundles also the tasks into jobs.

Bundling needs careful planning as it also depends on the business management system you’re using. The success of bundling depends on multiple configurations such as workflow mapping for job bundling purposes, project name mapping, file mapping and instructions mapping.

First, decide with the BeLazy users together if you need bundling. If you do, be aware that BeLazy always bundles opportunities based on identical values, or regex matches. For example, if two opportunity names are 43225-01-20 and 43225-03-24, and the first five numbers tell you that your customer considers this to be the same task as the other, and the second number tells the language and the third the workflow step in the customer's system, you can set up task bundling if the first five characters match, and job bundling if the first eight characters match (because for translation and review jobs to match, you also need the language to be identical). In other cases you may want to bundle projects into tasks by the month of the creation date, or the name of the workflow and the localization program.

You can read more about how this feature affects the API in the Projects and BMS projects section of The structure of an opportunity and project article.