Allied Vision — Bringing a global product world together

Allied Vision is one of the world's leading manufacturers of industrial and machine vision cameras, serving customers in automation, imaging and life sciences from sites in Germany, North America and Asia. As part of the TKH Group, Allied Vision brought five brands together under one roof: Allied Vision, SVS-Vistek, Chromasens, Mikrotron and Euresys. The new website had to present them as one company with one product range.

Each brand came with its own website, its own systems and its own way of describing a camera. The same property had different names, units and structures depending on where it came from. The goal was a single catalogue in which every camera can be compared with every other — regardless of its brand.

The schedule was tight: six months from the end of the concept phase to launch. Customers in Asia had to be served in their own languages from day one, including a working setup for mainland China. And the established search rankings and bookmarks of five websites had to survive the switch.

One product model, many sources

The core of the project is a structured product model in Silverstripe CMS: cameras, variants and options with 150+ specification fields per camera. Each source received its own import and field mapping, so the migration could be repeated and verified as often as needed until launch. Around 850 cameras were consolidated for launch; since then, the range of accessories is being added step by step.

Making the catalogue usable

Data alone does not help a customer choose a camera. The Camera Selector — faceted search across all brands — lets users narrow the range by sensor, resolution, interface and more, compare models side by side and calculate frame rates. Technical datasheets are generated as PDFs directly from the CMS data, so they are never out of date.

AI-assisted product advice

Allied Vision aims to be the most customer-centric company in the machine vision industry. An AI assistant, developed by TKH Artificial Intelligence and optimised for camera consultation, answers technical product questions and refers customers to the matching product page. The structured product pages built in Silverstripe CMS give it a reliable, citable basis for its answers.

A clean switch

At launch, 7,500 redirects caught the URLs of the previous websites and sent visitors and search engines to the matching new pages.

Global by design

The site runs in seven locales with Fluent. New content is translated automatically with DeepL, using a glossary per language so technical terms stay consistent. Visitors from China are routed to a dedicated alliedvision.cn setup. Site search uses Typesense across pages and cameras in every language.

Portals and integrations

A partner programme with self-registration, approval workflow and a protected partner area; protected downloads; and an employee intranet for four sites with SharePoint integration. Product enquiries go straight to Salesforce, marketing forms feed into HubSpot, and job advertisements are synchronised automatically from the Persis HR system.

Allied Vision launched the new platform on schedule and now presents its entire portfolio in one place, in seven languages. Along the way, we extended the community module s2hub/silverstripe-autotranslate with DeepL support and per-language glossaries — available to every Silverstripe CMS project that translates with Fluent.

The platform keeps growing. We are currently integrating an open-source PIM solution as the central source for product data, and connecting the Comarch ERP for customer-specific prices and customer logins.