CASE STUDY
Bilingual Japanese-English Estimating System in the mid 90s.
Early days of the web; Unicode was not yet widely supported, few websites were connected to databases and fewer still data-driven, and time to solution was of utmost importance.
Challenge
Two main problems presented themselves; the language barrier, and the time zone difference
Approach
We needed to move the client from phone to web based communication for order processing in order to solve both the time and language concerns.
Solution
Recognizing the constrained vocabulary and limited options to choose from, we created a system of pointers to appropriate Japanese language texts to facilitate web based ordering
Client
SRI Homes International
Category
Prototyping Development
Process
We needed to move the client from phone to web based communication for order processing in order to solve both the time and language concerns.
Result
Recognizing the constrained vocabulary and limited options to choose from, I created a system of pointers to appropriate Japanese language texts to facilitate web based ordering
These were early days on the web. Most sites were little more than glorified brochure-wear, and very few were connected to databases. DBMSs did not support Unicode text. While waiting to hear back about how what we wanted to do was impossible, we went ahead and built it.
Our client was responding to the horrific Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995. Emergency housing was desperately needed and North American companies were scrambling to try and fill the demand. Transport time was fixed at a little over 3 weeks due to the necessity of shipping by ocean container. Manufacturing had been honed into a single day process. The ordering process was the bottleneck. The time zone challenge alone meant someone was always waiting for someone else to return a call. Throw in the language barrier and we had some serious challenges. Our solution shaved weeks off of what had previously taken a month or more to do. This meant our client could communicate better and respond significantly faster than their competitors. Our client's foresight and willingness to employee a native Japanese speaker, as well as their willingness to be bold during the envisioning phase, allowed us to come up with something that had never been done up until that point.
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