Mercedes Benz

Bottom line up front

• Mercedes-Benz manages vehicle content across dozens of markets and languages. Getting the right words to the right place, in the right language, quickly and accurately, is a serious operational challenge — one that only gets harder when specialist automotive terminology is involved and when the same language is spoken differently across different countries.

• Growcreate designed and built an AI-powered translation workflow on Umbraco and Azure that made the whole process faster, more accurate and far easier for editorial teams to manage. We then migrated the platform to a dedicated Azure environment, upgraded the CMS to Umbraco v13 and built a custom API to connect the back office cleanly with a separately managed front end.

• The result is a modern, scalable content platform that Mercedes editors can run with confidence — and that Growcreate continues to support, enhance and evolve.

The challenge

Mercedes-Benz produces large volumes of vehicle and marketing content that needs to reach multiple countries and language markets. The existing system had grown organically and the cracks were showing. A heavily customised translation workflow required constant manual oversight from editors and translators, slowing down publishing and creating unnecessary friction at every stage.

The platform itself added to the problem. Hosted on Umbraco Cloud, it was running into resource limits that affected performance — particularly when several translators were working simultaneously. A separately managed front end, built and maintained by a third-party agency, meant that connecting back-office content management to the live site required custom API work and careful coordination that had become harder to maintain over time.

The right fix wasn't just a tweak to the workflow. Mercedes needed a more robust infrastructure, a cleaner CMS and a smarter approach to translation — one that could handle the scale of a global automotive brand without burdening the editorial team.

Our approach

AI-powered translation workflow

Before most people had heard of ChatGPT, we built an AI-powered content workflow that coordinated creation and automated translation across multiple languages and territories. Our engine uses Azure AI Services to handle localisation at pace — including the kind of specialist automotive terminology that varies between countries speaking the same language, where a simple word-for-word translation simply isn't good enough.

We integrated the Microsoft Translation API to automate the first-pass translation, then designed the workflow so that human editors could step in to review, refine and approve before anything went live. The result is a process that moves quickly without sacrificing accuracy — the right blend of automation and human judgement.

Platform migration and CMS upgrade

We moved the platform from Umbraco Cloud to a dedicated Azure environment, giving the team significantly better performance, more predictable resource allocation and the headroom to grow. The migration was planned carefully to protect availability throughout — no surprises, no lost content, no disruption to the editorial team mid-process.

As part of the migration, we upgraded the CMS from the existing version to Umbraco v13. Where the previous setup had relied on a layer of custom-built permissions to manage access, we replaced this with Umbraco's native user management — reducing technical debt, making the system easier to maintain and setting the platform up for a much cleaner long-term roadmap.

Custom API integration

Because the front end was developed and managed by a separate agency, keeping the back-office content management system and the live site talking to each other cleanly was critical. We built a custom API that made that communication reliable and straightforward, removing the fragility that had built up in the previous integration and giving both teams a clear, well-documented connection to work with.

We also refactored the underlying code to improve performance when multiple translators are working at the same time — which, for a global content operation, happens regularly.

Results and impact

For the Mercedes editorial team, the difference is tangible. What was once a slow, manually intensive process — with editors chasing translations, managing complex custom workflows and working around platform limitations — is now fast, structured and straightforward. Content moves through the pipeline more quickly, translation accuracy is higher, and the team spends less time managing the system and more time on the work that matters.

The platform itself is in a stronger position too. Running on Azure with a modern, well-maintained Umbraco v13 CMS, it is more reliable, more scalable and significantly easier to support and evolve. Technical debt has been reduced, the integration between back office and front end is clean and documented, and the codebase is in good shape for whatever comes next.

Growcreate continues to support Mercedes with ongoing platform maintenance, hosting management and CMS optimisation — keeping the system performing well and ready to grow.

Key outcomes

• A faster, cleaner translation and publishing process with the right balance of automation and human review

• Migration to Azure with improved performance, reliability and room to scale

• Umbraco v13 upgrade that reduced technical debt and simplified long-term support

• A robust custom API connecting back office and front end with clarity and confidence

• Ongoing partnership: support, enhancements and hosting management that keeps the platform moving