Estimate job duration and preview cost before assigning a job

Estimate job duration and preview cost before assigning a job

Dear users,

We just added a nice new feature that helps with assigning jobs and estimating deadlines at a single click:

Tell me duration and cost

Whenever you manually assign a job, you see this popup window with the eligible in-house or external workers for the task and language combination:

Since today you see some changes here including that new "Sigma" button. Click the button:

The system instantly estimates the work duration and displays the total cost.

There is a small "details" link to the right which gives you in-depth information and help on how those calculations are done. In a nutshell, the duration takes into consideration:

• The capacity saved with the supplier's service. The service not just sets the unitary price, discounts and so on. It also lets you define how many "units" (such as words) the in-house worker or external supplier typically can do during an 8 hours work day.

• The weekends, work times and off days of the supplier. These are configurable in the person or company "Planning" page. A estimated job end date will always be within the work times of the supplier (a worker will always finish his/her work during work times).
  Suppliers can edit that information themselves from their "My account" link:

• The timezone, obviously.

• The service discounts. Although discounts are there to calculate cost, we also leverage this information to more accurately calculate the work load for a job:
  

  The system reduces the total units to work on proportionally to service discounts.

  For example, if 500 out of 1000 units are pretranslated at a discount of 50%, then those 500 units are counted as just 250. The total then becomes 750.

  The assumption is that any discounts imply reduced workload.

Adding capacity details

As you have read above, deadline estimation may require that you complete capacity information for your suppliers.

For an external supplier, navigate to the supplier pricelist and complete this information:

For an in-house worker, go to "My company" click "People & Logins" and choose a worker. Then complete the service details:

Other less known features

Again, in the supplier selection popup, you can expand each supplier with the little arrow button on the left. You will see active jobs, pricing details and more.

When you want to assign a supplier group to a job, you also can expand the group:

Then expand details:

More to come

We will soon add:

• Deadline checks when a client submits an order. The system will inform the client of the estimated duration and if the expected deadline can be met or not.

• Full start date and deadline calculation for a complete workflow. That is, when you mark a file for translation and you have translation, revision and proofreading steps then the system will (upon demand) automatically set all deadlines for you.

• There will be other planning related enhancements. A regular request was for being able to set the timezone individually per user and not just company. We hope to be able to do this in the not so far future!

Thank you for reading,

Your Wordbee Team