BeLazy connects with different business management systems (BMS) by organizing work into three levels:
BMS Projects – These are also called Orders in Plunet, Projects in XTRF and Protemos.
BMS Tasks – These correspond to Items in Plunet or Tasks in XTRF Classic projects. (Protemos and XTRF Smart projects don’t use tasks in the same way.) Generally it is a good idea to have one continuous set of steps as a single task (for example, the same project’s translation and review can be one task, whereas the change implementation for the same project is a new task).
BMS Jobs – These are the smallest work units, used for tracking progress and automation (translation, review, change implementation, but also quality assurance, machine translation are jobs), units that can be assigned to one manual or automated vendor qualify as one BMS job.
An opportunity is what you see listed under Approvals Pending. It represents a small piece of work that can usually be accepted or rejected. Depending on the system, opportunities can look different — some are bilingual, others multilingual, and some may group or separate files differently.
What is bundling?
Bundling lets you group several opportunities together into one BMS project. Opportunities and BeLazy projects normally come from the client systems, via the Content and Project Hub. BMS projects, tasks and jobs are the representation in your system in the Business Management Hub.
You can bundling to:
Combine multiple language pairs into a single project (for example, English–French and English–Chinese in one project).
Create recurring projects (daily, weekly, or monthly) and keep adding new jobs to the same ongoing project.
Merge related jobs like translation and review into a single workflow, where each task becomes a separate BMS job.
Before you start
If this is your first time setting up the connector, skip bundling for now. It requires careful planning, since its configuration depends on your BMS and the way your workflows are structured. Even within the same tool (like XTRF Classic vs. Smart), bundling behaves differently.
Successful bundling depends on consistent setup in several areas:
Workflow mapping
Project name mapping
File mapping
Instructions mapping
If you’re new to BeLazy, simply click Next and return to bundling once your basic setup is running smoothly.
How does bundling work?
Bundling checks for the common aspects of projects. For example, if you want to create a daily project, the common aspect is that the project creation date or the deadline be the same day. However, this bundling will create one single project for every end client under a certain client (client is separate, that is never merged). If you wish to have one daily project for every end client under connection, you need to bundle by the project creation date and by the end client being equal. Equality is a must: you cannot bundle for example an end client that contains "Client Inc" with an end client that contains "Client Ltd". If you need to bundle such values, you can extend the extradata description of a project with a new piece of data that is like "End client brand", and have the same value populated in these two cases. This is done using the Update Opportunity API call.
The first level of merging is merging multiple opportunities/BeLazy projects into one BMS project. This by default creates multiple BMS tasks within the same BMS project. This is enough in the case of multilingual projects and mostly enough in the case of daily projects: there is one daily project with one item per assignment.
The second level of merging is merging those opportunities/BeLazy projects into BeLazy jobs. This goes a level deeper, to the workflow level, and places separately arriving work into different workflow steps. This is what you need to merge translation and review tasks separately arriving into one workflow of two steps.
When BeLazy does not find other BMS projects that would be candidates to bundle into, it creates a new BMS project the same way as if there was no bundling configured. Later, BeLazy finds the created BMS project, and instead of creating a new one, it updates the information in the existing one. BeLazy can only bundle into BMS projects created by BeLazy.
Prerequisites
There are a couple of prerequisites you must bear in mind before you embark on bundling:
- Multiple language pair projects and recurring projects are easier to create. However, if you want to create multilingual projects from several bilingual projects, make sure you do not use languages in the project naming convention, because you will end up with the target language of the first accepted project.
- Only opportunities/projects assigned to the same BMS workflow can be bundled together. This means the client can send different workflows, but the BMS workflow you select for mapping must be the same.
- If you are using XTRF Smart projects and Protemos, there is no concept of BMS tasks, and thus files are just stored on the project level. Unless you zip the files, you will not know which file relates to which part of the project, so enable zipping.
- Before starting to configure bundling, check Unit of acceptance and Multiple target languages in the connector-specific documentation.
- Configure your workflows so that there is space for the various workflow steps. Check more information about the workflow configuration here.
- Read up on the extradata-based bundling here. This is powerful, advanced functionality, but requires a high degree of orchestration knowledge.
How to configure bundling?
First, decide which level of bundling you enable. Merge order/project if merges new BeLazy opportunities into existing BMS projects. Merge item/task if goes one level deeper, and if a BeLazy opportunity could be merged into a new task in an existing BMS project, it examines whether it could also be merged into an existing BMS job.
If you only enable Merging is turned ON for Merge order if, and do not specify properties, all projects coming from the connection will be merged into one BMS project. Add properties from the Select properties you want to use list where the value must be identical in order to be bundled into the same BMS projects. For example, if you receive many bilingual projects from a TMS with the same name (like in the case of XTM or Across), select "Name (matches on value)". Matches on value is an option in every condition, however, Name can match also with regex, and dates can match on day, month, and week. In the case of monthly bundling, you can also set up a different day than the first calendar day to mark the end of the (financial) month. In that case you'll have two projects: one for the reminder of the month for that day, and one for the month from the first to the financial turning day.
If you enable Merge item/project if, but you do not specify more properties, it mostly affects multi-file projects: it will create one job for all files. If you disable this, each file gets another task/item. If you set up more properties, like Name, you can merge for example translation and review tasks.
Important: always read the text on the screen. Bundling instructions on screen guide you with the most frequent bundling configurations for each and every connector.
What about bundling prices?
If you have a multi-file job or task, you can either have detailed analysis for each and every file, or you can have a single, consolidated word count/analysis. This is what we call receivable/payable bundling. Receivable/payable bundling exists in BeLazy, but it is not configured per connection, rather it is a capability configured under Manage my business management system.