According to many studies, simultaneously shipping (simship) localized products with the original is supposed to produce approximately 30% in additional revenues. However, simship involves much more than just shipping the localized products simultaneously. It is absolutely critical to create SimMarketing, SimSales, SimTraining, SimProfessionalServices, etc. efforts in parallel to SimShip to ensure that real revenues will actually be generated. There are cross-organizational processes that must be implemented to support these efforts and linked to the development lifecycle processes.

Why SimShip?

Bringing a product to the market earlier creates a longer opportunity for selling it. When the marketing effort for the domestic market is combined with regional and local efforts, the effect is synergistic. As a result, local competitors have no time to imitate your product’s features or to propose a localized alternative. The rule of thumb is for revenues to increase anywhere from 15-30%.

So you polish your processes, make your Chinese (Korean, Japanese or German) service providers work around the clock. You pay a premium price for unneeded translations of material that will be updated just two days before the release. You push QA to the edge to test yet another build because an English string was changed at the last minute – which ends up rippling through to changes in 40 screen shots across three books. Yet, you still succeed in shipping your product only two days after the English release (with a huge sigh of relief).

Then, you arrange a trip to Beijing (Seoul, Tokyo or Frankfurt) to personally deliver the new localized product to the sales guys. You have done everything right! You did it! There’s just one catch – it turns out that your Chinese sales people have a lot to do and won’t even have time to review the new product until next month ...

This actually happened to me and my R&D Team, so I decided to step back to analyze the value of simshipping and what else has to be done in order to actually produce increased revenues.

Building Global, Enterprise-wide Momentum

The key to understanding and truly leveraging the simship process is to wrap your mind around the fact that your product must be delivered to the market at the optimum time. The objective of building a product is to sell it (obviously). The early arrival of a product is a waste of money/effort. It needs to arrive “on-time,” i.e., when the sales people are ready (i.e., trained and knowledgeable) to sell it.

So, what does it take for simship to succeed business-wise? Successful simship requires a global, enterprise-wide momentum that builds up to the release. The climax of this momentum is the product release. Hence, for simship to be successful, all momentum-building efforts that are planned for the localized release must be made simultaneously with those for your English-speaking market(s). The momentum must be built across all organizational units enterprise-wide, worldwide. It’s a huge effort that is a bit like conducting an orchestra, or the ship will literally sink.

Once your entire organization agrees that simship is the way to go, you must all work together to clearly identify all stakeholders and to define roles and accountability – only with accountable personnel will the organization succeed in implementing a process this big and this complex. Take the opportunity to learn from others in your industry – simship can be very different, depending on the industry and the market need, i.e., simship for consumer markets is totally different from simship in the high-tech industry.

Virtual global teams are an essential component for implementing and maintaining successful simship processes enterprise-wide. Communication is usually underestimated as an issue when working in global virtual teams. In my opinion, everything starts and ends with good communication. Management must take care to mitigate the communication risks by providing enough budget resources to bridge them, i.e., travel budget, video conferencing capabilities, etc. You must also develop, along with your colleagues, a well-defined process for information sharing between all team members, regardless of time zone, location, native language, organizational function, and so on.

Your Product Must Arrive at the Optimum Time – and Not a Minute Before

SimSales

Since SimShip must be done in parallel with the English product development lifecycle, it follows that SimSales must be done in parallel with your domestic sales activities. In other words, SimSales is the process of aligning worldwide sales efforts with the domestic ones. This is done through your sales people (1) obtaining a copy of the product (English or localized) to “play with” in the early stages (a few months before the official release); (2) understanding the new value proposition of the new features (a few weeks before the official release); and (3) receiving technical training on the product its pitfalls (a few weeks before the release). Since the Sales personnel are the ones who must convince the customer of the value proposition of your product, they need (1) to know the product’s new features; (2) to be able to do demos with it; (3) to know where the pitfalls lie; (4) to create a successful proof-of-concept in the customer’s environment; and (5) to teach your partners numbers 1-4.

SimMarketing

Your marketing strategies must also be ready early enough to support the Sales organization. Marketing materials must include references to the localized product, e.g., screenshots that are embedded in the marketing presentations. Marketing usually ends up between the “hammer” and the “anvil” in the sense that Sales always wants their materials as soon as possible, but R&D will only supply the localized product late in the process since UI localization is done only when the English UI is nearly complete.

SimSupport and SimTraining

The Support and Training organizations must also be trained. Usually, instructing them on the English product is sufficient, although some training must be done on the localized product to cover localization-related bugs and local terminology.

SimProfessionalServices

If your product requires post-sales Professional Services, then this group must be trained as well. Although entering the game at a later stage, this group is expected to be professional, i.e., they are expected to know your product as deeply as possible, which means they require more time to learn and play with it in order to later adapt it for various customer requirements and environments.

Target Market Maturity

Even if your organization works like a Swiss clock, and simship runs perfectly every time, the process also depends on other factors for its success. One of the critical factors is the maturity of your target markets. The level of maturity determines whether or not you should simship and what products you should include.

Different cultures and local business practices determine different behavior in accepting new product releases. The Japanese, for example, are hesitant, while the Koreans tend to be very early adopters. The competition also varies from market to market, e.g., you may decide not to release all products in all markets.

In other words, you must understand all of your target markets very well before you can decide if simship will generate enough additional revenues for the effort to be worth it. It’s not always possible to perfectly adjust the home market launch plan for other places in the world.

Aligning the Enterprise for Simship

Marketing cares what the product looks like, not what it really does. Sales needs to understand the new value proposition. Technical Sales wants to “play” with the product prior to release to confirm the pitfalls in advance. Support, Training and Professional Services all need to know the product inside and out, along with its localized terminology and bugs.

What Happens If the Enterprise Is Not Aligned?

You will end up spending money with no return if your entire organization is not aligned. R&D will become frustrated since their personal investment will have been given in vain. Sales won’t be able to sell the product because they won’t be confident in it. Marketing will not be able to create its materials properly.

If you do SimShip, you must do it right. Otherwise, don’t do it.

Development Lifecycle Perspective

In order for simship to work, the timeline from when you start your development efforts to UI freeze is critical – UI freeze is the point at which Marketing can start to make screenshots. This date also determines when training will take place for all groups involved (including your external service providers and partners).

R&D will always push the UI freeze as close as possible to the release date since, in their minds, UI bugs are usually considered to be less important than others. At the same time, the Localization Manager will be pushing the UI freeze date up as much as possible to leave more time for marketing preparation. (See my slides from the LISA Forum Asia China Focus for a diagram of this process.)

How Much Does SimShip Cost?

According to research and my own company’s experience, a simship release will cost R&D around 10-20% more than a non-simship release. The increase is due mostly to the extra translations of the UI. Aligning all of the organizational units to support simship, i.e., SimMarketing, SimSales, etc. has its own costs since it requires a worldwide enablement effort to actively support it. Remember, you are asking people to change their habits and their workflows, which is always difficult and always costs money in the short-term.

Additional headcount depends on the number of products / active markets and their complexity. Mercury Interactive requires about half a dozen additional personnel on a continuous basis to support simship. (We also have an Enablement Team to support the U.S. market.)

Establishing SimShip Processes

In smaller companies in which processes are not already established, you will have to initiate the new processes that are required in order to repeatedly achieve simship. Otherwise, it will be random. Putting such processes in place is tough and requires a lot of time and effort. Automating these processes costs even more.

The Role of Your Localization Service Provider

You will generally need to work with multi-language service providers in order to achieve the best results with simship. This is because they are bigger and more experienced in achieving simship with other companies. This will usually cost more than working with a small number of single-language service providers, but not always.

When Should You Strive for SimShip?

The answer to the question, “Should your goal always be simship?” is “Not always!” You should only do it if the following conditions exist:

• When your business actually requires it.
• When the target market is ready to accept new releases / products quickly. Mercury actually stopped simshipping to Japan when it became clear that this market only wanted products that had been in use for awhile and proven to be successful in the U.S. market.
• When both Marketing and Sales are willing to invest the additional time and money required to align with R&D.
• When R&D is mature enough to enable the UI freeze early enough in the development cycle to allow other parts of the organization to prepare themselves adequately for simship.

Convincing Others

You must constantly evangelize globalization enterprise-wide and maintain a very flexible, open environment to foster discussion. Encourage your R&D Team to understand that what and when they do things has a big effect on customers and on company revenues.

When it comes time to convince your executives to invest in simship, you will need to present some nice graphs with the magic word on them, i.e., ROI (return on investment)! And, of course, that’s a really tough question to answer since calculating ROI for localization, and simship in particular, is very hard to measure.

The questions that you must ask yourself and your colleagues include the following. How much extra revenue should you project for the localized versions? Can you really measure the difference between releasing the localized versions a few days vs. a few months after the original version? Even in post-analysis, you may find it hard to distinguish the contribution of simship to the revenues gained.

Is There a Simple Solution for the ROI Question?

No. But you can review the presentation that I did with Brenda Hall (CEO of Bridge360) at the LISA Forum Asia China Focus in Shanghai for some new ideas to help you get started.

The Bottom Line?

SimShip is just one more business decision to be taken, based on the gains and risks involved. The risk is big. Successful simship requires an investment in money, time and a lot of effort. To gain the ROI, you have to do it right – ALL across the board and enterprise-wide. Look before you leap!

How Have We Implemented SimShip at Mercury Interactive?

Mercury’s decisionmaking model for simship works as follows. Either I, or someone from my team, visits the field at least once every quarter (we visited the field three times this quarter). We continuously update our yearly plans every quarter through calls and email.

This close contact enables Marketing and me to choose the candidates for simship by prioritizing our markets. The selected products receive a higher priority (functional through linguistic testing, along with everything else). We also ensure that our localization service providers are fully aware of our plans at every step. That way, we can make more aggressive demands on them. Obviously, it is impossible to simship for all countries and all languages.

We currently simship ECJK (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) for all products. We are now in the process of implementing simship in Europe for French and German. We also have plans to add more simship products to the Italian and Spanish lines, and maybe take a look at extending simship coverage to Brazilian Portuguese. Currently, we simship 10-15 products in 6-7 languages. Assuming 1-3 major releases (plus a few minor ones) per year per product per language, this means that we’re simshipping about 20 releases in 4-5 languages, with approximately half of them simshipped!

Even with all of these releases, we are able to conduct “user experience” sessions at Mercury. We bring the users in early in the process, but we are very careful to manage their expectations, e.g., the fact that there won’t be too many UI changes (though R&D WILL change the UI anyway!). You can’t fight the latter, so you must find ways to deal with it. If you define simship as shipping localized product no longer than one month after the initial domestic release, you can usually adapt to the changes. The main challenge, of course, is the documentation changes.

Mercury employs about thirty in-house writers who create content with Adobe FrameMaker. Since FrameMaker creates a lot of localization problems, we are currently trying to convince the writers to adopt a CMS system that will be topic-based. We are also looking at ways to reduce our translation requirements, e.g., if the Chinese users don’t read the docs, why should we bother to translate them? Currently, we only translate the UI for the Chinese. We only translate the docs into Japanese and sometimes into Korean. We manage all translation from Israel.

It’s all about delivering the right products to the right markets at the right time. If simship helps you do this, while enabling additional revenues at the same time, then it makes sense. If it doesn’t then don’t do it.

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Hanan Lavy is International R&D Manager for Mercury Interactive where he manages an international R&D Team of 25 people who develop, manage, localize and test solutions worldwide for all of Mercury’s non-English-speaking markets. Lavy holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Business Administration from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. You can reach him at hlavy@mercury.com.