In 2015, Emerson restructured its business into two main divisions – Automation Solutions and Commercial & Residential. Emerson showcased both businesses in one modern web experience, bringing together multiple business units, brands, teams, and programs under one umbrella - the new Emerson.com.

“Within the Automation Solutions division of Emerson, each business group has its own portfolio, marketing messages, campaigns, and more,” said Kelly George, Senior Program Manager with Emerson’s web operations team. “Bringing everyone under the same roof gives us a chance to centralize, standardize, and deliver high quality content quickly to local markets.”

With the deployment of online purchasing capabilities, Emerson’s eCommerce product availability grew nearly 600% in less than two years. This expansion included a new product portfolio for Machine Automation Solutions which added hundreds of new products. The challenge then became how to localize this content in key markets during an economic downturn triggered by changes in the energy markets and exacerbated by the global pandemic.

Given the scale of the project, Emerson selected LILT to help scale efficiently but also ensure they would be prepared to tackle bigger, future projects. “We have a huge volume of product content that needs translation to serve our global markets locally,” said Kelly. “It’s still growing - we offer over a half a million product items, and while there’s repetitive content, the sheer volume makes translation expensive.”

On top of cost sensitivity, there are time-to-market dependencies. Like many global companies, Emerson relies on internal in-country reviewers who ensure that translated content delivers credibility, conveys expertise, and maintains fidelity to the Emerson brand in the local markets it serves. This additional layer of human touch for translated product content can inadvertently delay or even prevent timely delivery to market.

The question on the table was whether or not a different technology toolset and environment could move the needle on how quickly and confidently internal reviewers would sign off on a set of translations. This open question is why Emerson turned to LILT.

“The way LILT manages content inside the application, particularly with neural machine translation and human-in-the-loop, makes things easy to use,” she said. “And since the translation memory updates in real time, working with LILT simply made sense for translating the large volume of new content for the Machine Automation Solutions portfolio.”

LILT’s community of talented linguists, combined with its intuitive and user-friendly interfaces all wrapped up in sophisticated adaptive neural translation software, nets out to a high-quality product, requiring only a light touch from Emerson’s in-country reviewers.

Looking ahead, Emerson will continue balancing its investment for translated content supporting local market sales, which in turn, support annual growth goals against other business needs.