Case Study: Rentokil Initial achieves up to 35% translation cost savings and faster global communications with RWS (SDL Translation Management)

Centralized Translation Improves Global Customer Communications

Rentokil Initial, a global business services company with ~27,000 employees across nearly 70 countries, faced costly inefficiencies from a decentralized, ad hoc approach to translation. Different offices used varied vendors or informal internal translators, causing duplicated work, inconsistent communications and long delays—quotes could take up to seven days—and the company estimated 40% of its roughly 4 million annual translated words were being needlessly retranslated.

To fix this, Rentokil implemented SDL Translation Management (including WorldServer and BeGlobal) in a four-week rollout, registering ~150 project managers and creating a reusable translation database. The new centralized process cut quote time from seven days to under two minutes, reduced average per-word spend by about 20% (up to 35% on core languages), sped delivery of training materials by 40%, increased global consistency and freed multilingual staff for strategic work.

Rentokil Initial

Richard Gregory

Head of U+