Family-owned with a history dating back to 1865, Bühler is an OEM that specialises in manufacturing and customising processing equipment, with a significant presence in the food industry. “Globally, we make an impact on the lives of some two billion people every day,” begins Marco Sutter, MD of Bühler Southern Africa.
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The Johannesburg-based South African manufacturing facility has a continuous operation for rebuilding, fluting and grinding mill rolls for locally installed Bühler grain milling machines.
Bühler's global operations span 140 countries, with 30 production sites, including the one in Johannesburg. The specialist product range includes grain milling machines, for which Bühler enjoys a whopping 65% of global market share. Some other notable global processing machinery on offer from the company include:
For vehicle manufacturers, Bühler manufactures die-casting machines for engine blocks. These can typically deliver pressures of 9 000 t/cm and produce one engine casting every 40 s.
Lenses for cellphone cameras are coated using nanotechnologies and spray-application machines from Bühler.
Cosmetic products such as lipstick pigments are accurately mixed and dispersed to give the accurate colour ranges of end products.
For Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles, the company produces the machines for injecting electrolytic pastes.
Bühler machines are used to blend and formulate pet and farm animal foods and to extrude pellets.
The company makes sweet-, biscuit- and wafer-machines, as well as meat-free textured soya-protein, “which is now a modern trend in society, while also being cheaper than meat”.
Bühler makes noodle and pasta extrusion systems, as well as processing machines for all shapes and sizes of breakfast cereals and snacks.
“We manufacture machines for food, feed and advanced materials, but the food processing side, at around 60%, is still the biggest pillar of our company’s global turnover,” Marco Sutter continues.
“And manufacturing processes often require a series of processing machines. For the processing of coffee, for example, we have the cleaning, the roasting and then the grinding processes, and 60% of the world’s ground coffee is produced using our solutions,” he adds.
Turning back to grain, he says that Bühler’s range of milling solutions for wheat, maize and grains such as sorghum, are ubiquitous across the world. “Some 65% of the 380-million tons of grain produced every year comes off a Bühler-manufacturing machine,” Sutter estimates.
Local manufacturing and project services
The Johannesburg-based South African manufacturing facility is mostly dedicated to producing Bühler aftermarket replacement components for the company’s installed base across Africa, which includes the company’s conveyor systems for the mining industry, fluted mill rollers and hammer mills for grain, and food-grade conveyors and bucket elevators for the local food industry. “We produce OEM spares such as impact rollers for the grinding mills; manganese-steel bars and chain links for conveyor systems; and powder-coated parts for food-grade conveyors,” he notes, adding that Bühler Southern Africa currently employs 220 people.
The Southern African arm of the company also offers customised repair and refurbishment services for all Bühler machines, along with installation support for the bins, buckets, piping, conveyors and any bulky balance of plant items needed for core processing systems imported from overseas. “We have three sites, Cape Town, which was the integrated in 2013, Lusaka which opened in 2010, and our original facility here in Johannesburg, where we have had a Bühler presence since 1972 and a servicing operation since 1975,” Sutter notes.
The Johannesburg facility has three workshops and deals with customer services and the manufacture of OEM spares. “We have a continuous operation for rebuilding, fluting and grinding mill rolls for our local grain milling machines. This involves precision machining to get the flutes perfectly aligned for optimal performance once put back into service,” he says.
These rolls are completely disassembled before being re-machined to the original OEM specification. All the spares such as bearings and housings are replaced by either bringing them in from Bühler sites overseas or sourcing them from local suppliers. “We also keep locally manufactured and imported spare parts in stock for most our locally installed equipment, depending on specific service and supply agreements with customers,” he adds.
Bühler implements rigorous inspection procedures and quality control for imported, locally sourced and in-house manufactured parts, all based on its global OEM standards. “This is particularly important for the scrapers and silicon-coated conveyor products for maintaining food-hygiene standards in the food industry, for example,” Sutter tells MCA.
Bühler Southern Africa can also do complete machine refurbishments, where a whole unit is disassembled, assessed, rebuilt, sand blasted and repainted. “Our refurbishments are delivered back to clients as near-new OEM rebuilds. Mostly from the Johannesburg facility, though, we are replacing wear parts or retrofitting machines that may be up to 30 years old to comply with current food safety standards.”
The local company also offers automation retrofits – replacing an unsupported control system with a new one and doing electrical upgrades. “We have recently completed one of these upgrades that needed a couple of kilometres of new cabling. This, alone, could have stopped onsite production for two months. But following assessment, planning and advanced preparation and manufacturing of the wiring loom and other components, we were able to complete the upgrade with only 10 days of machine downtime,” Marco Sutter tells MechChem Africa.
He says that the emergence of digital products is changing the nature of servicing and lifecycle management of Bühler machines: towards being much more proactive and predictive. Increasingly, Bühler is incorporating digital monitoring and sensors into its machines and using AI analytics to keep track of their performance and health.
The analysis software is developed in Switzerland, but installed and monitored by local service engineers. “Depending on the package, we typically have monthly interactions with the customers, examining their secure dashboards and suggesting what needs to be done to improve productivity.
“This software not only checks if a machine is likely to fail: we are now able to take a deep dive into a plant’s whole process, identify which of the many machines are under-performing and so finding ways of eliminating bottlenecks.
“For top level management at board meetings, it is fantastic to be able to highlight the efficiency of a mill in real time: the power consumption; the mill yields; the energy efficiency; and the production costs of all the different products. And instead of seeing these numbers on spreadsheets summarising a very limited time period, they can see live data and track back to compare this to any period in past at any level of detail,” says Sutter.
Skills development is another key area for Bühler Southern Africa. “We run apprenticeship and learnership programmes, with around 14 apprentices in the Johannesburg workshop this year. We have trainees in the offices as well, and we employ our own IT and finance teams, which are supported by our centralised team from Prague,” he says.
On the sustainability side, he adds that the company is simultaneously targeting waste, water and power for its reduce, recycle and reuse campaign. “On the power side, we are already generating 350 kWh per day from our solar panels on the roof to help us meet a 50% power draw reduction target. We also hope to double this to 700 kWh per day by 2025, which should keep us, on average, independent of the national grid.
“We also recycle all of our office waste, and in the workshop we have bins for glass and all scrap metal waste. A new wastewater harvesting system has now been incorporated into the roof of our new warehouse storage area, with JoJo tanks collecting rainwater from the shed roof for grey water use,” he says.
“Globally, Bühler is striving to create a better world, with a special focus on healthy, safe, and sustainable solutions. We are bringing that vision into Southern Africa, through servicing solutions for installed assets that deliver productivity and up-time improvements. And we are open to jointly develop new concepts and to address local challenges and targets,” concludes Marco Sutter.
