Bühler: Digitalizing manufacturing to drive productivity, quality, and sustainability
Digital manufacturing drives productivity and innovation
With a mission to drive innovation, this global producer of food and automotive manufacturing equipment needed to reduce its paper-based processes and digitalize its operations. Using the SAP Digital Manufacturing solution, Bühler has seen improvements in operator productivity, quality, and sustainability.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Manufacturing | Switzerland | 12,500 employees | concircle Schweiz AG |
transition of orders to SAP Digital Manufacturing
production with real-time data on the shop floor
sustainable operations due to lean manufacturing
Head of Manufacturing, Switzerland, Bühler
With a mission to innovate for its customers, Bühler had to digitalize its manufacturing
Two billion people each day enjoy foods produced on Bühler equipment, and one billion people travel in vehicles manufactured with parts produced using its machinery. Bühler’s mission is to drive innovation—including digital innovation—for a better world. The world’s population is growing and its customers need to produce food and automotive vehicles as efficiently and sustainably as possible.
Operating across 140 countries, with 100 service stations, and 30 manufacturing sites, Bühler needs to be able to innovate for the benefit of its global customer base. It wants to use the latest manufacturing technologies to improve processes, reduce costs, and remain sustainable.
At its headquarters in Uzwil, Switzerland, the company manufactures 600 very different products, each of which has its own drawings, bill of materials, and work instructions—all of which used to be paper-based. To remedy this, the company decided to digitalize its manufacturing processes with SAP Digital Manufacturing, an SAP Business Technology Platform public cloud-based solution.
Chief Information Officer, Bühler
A customized, cloud-based digital manufacturing solution
SAP Digital Manufacturing is a comprehensive manufacturing operations management (MOM) platform designed to enhance agility and foster a sustainable workforce. Bühler implemented it to replace its existing on-premise SAP Manufacturing Execution solution, and did so following an agile methodology. The company collected user stories from operators and configured the solution to meet their needs. This made the rollout easier, as users were familiar with the solution and were happy to adopt it.
To ensure a successful transition, Bühler collaborated with concircle, a digital manufacturing consultancy, to build the required functionality into their new solution and to flawlessly migrate all order data without causing any disruptions.
With the goal of streamlining manufacturing processes and data, Bühler decided to proceed with a cloud solution. SAP Digital Manufacturing meets Bühler’s need to drive productivity, quality, and sustainability.
Chief Information Officer, Bühler
Improvements in productivity and quality, enhanced by AI
The biggest benefit of the SAP Manufacturing Execution and SAP Digital Manufacturing solutions is operator productivity. Since all the information operators need is now available on the shop floor in a digital format, it saves them a lot of time searching for information on paper. Staff can also book their working time straight into the system rather than recording it on paper first.
Quality processes are built in. Operators can take a picture of a problem rather than having to type a description into a database. Change management is easier and less prone to error, as operators are always working with real-time data and have the latest order specification available to them.
Since SAP Digital Manufacturing is cloud-based, Bühler can be confident it is always using the latest technology. SAP will be constantly releasing new innovations, especially in AI. Workers will be able to interact with the system in natural language, which will reduce training costs, particularly among temporary workers.
Head of Manufacturing, Switzerland, Bühler
International rollout followed by continuous improvement
Bühler has successfully implemented SAP Digital Manufacturing in its Uzwil site and is now ready to roll it out to China, Germany, the UK, and beyond. The company says it probably won’t implement the solution at all 30 production sites worldwide, but concentrate on those where there is the greatest need and potential benefit.
After a couple of years, Bühler will see what improvements it can build into the solution. In the future, workers will be able to interact with the system in natural language and leverage AI to receive the right information about what they should do on the shop floor.
Sustainability is very important to Bühler. The company promises its customers that by using its products, they can reduce their energy consumption, water consumption, and waste by 50%. And now, with SAP Digital Manufacturing, Bühler itself can adopt the leanest manufacturing processes to make its own operations as sustainable as possible.
Featured partner
Bühler has a long-standing partnership with concircle Schweiz AG. As a trusted implementation partner for SAP Digital Manufacturing, concircle played a key role in this project by designing and delivering all required functionalities for the new solution.
Thanks to concircle’s deep understanding of customers processes and needs, their team was able to guide Bühler seamlessly on its journey into the cloud.