The Situation

MTU Asia is the regional HQ for the Asian region, managing a distribution network in 23 countries. MTU Friedrichshafen which is located in Germany is the largest supplier of diesel engines in the world.

An existing corporate web site had been created by the communications team in Germany where all brand guidelines and decisions are handled. And MTU Asia needed to have the ability to expand and take ownership of its on-line activities directly from the Singapore head office.

The brief entailed a sound knowledge of Typo3 development, a CMS widely used in Europe, and a strong branding capability to make sure that the new web site fell in line with the German standards.

The Challenge

We had several challenges placed before the Ad.WRIGHT team and as usual a short time frame to deliver, but luckily MTU Asia have very competent IT and Marketing staff to facilitate anything we needed during the next few months to keep the project on track and properly managed. Large projects can fail with out constant project managment on both sides of the client/supplier relationship.

The 2 main challenges were:

1. Replicating the hundreds of pages and products from the Germany site and re-coding in to a new installation of Typo3 but adapting to the new Asian styling. (We did not have access to the German database.)
2. Creating multi-language versions of the web site in 6 languages, without duplicating content. Localized versions of English would be used in places were relevant. Each language site would consist of both English and one of Mandarin, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Indonesian.

Another challenge came in the form of each language was not entirely translated so some pages were still kept in English to cut time and costs. Remember major changes were still made at the Germany head office and this had to be maintained across all content.

The Solution

Ad.WRIGHT's solution was to roll out multi-phases to keep the project moving. The first phase being the completion of the full English version, covering several hundreds of pages and products.

The next step was to implement a multi-language module that allowed MTU to create any language content they required within a single editing page, while on the public side this was completely switchable.

Administrators were only given permissions on content relevant per language. And public content was supplied based on the users locale browser preferences.

The Result

The MTU-Online.com.sg web site went live with no glitches in little over a month (a testiment to the Ad.WRIGHT teams speed). WIth the subsequent phases following within the 2 months proceeding.

This extra time was required to manage the coding of the new modules, while language translation and localization of the content followed in tandem.

Ad.WRIGHT offer language services to clients wishing to reach a much broader market. We suggest it shows a company is serious in working, collaborating or selling products and services in to countries outside of its own.

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