SmartMill

Join the journey

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SmartMill

Join the journey

SmartMill is Bühler’s journey to optimize yield, increase product quality, improve traceability, reduce energy consumption and increase overall plant efficiency. We have laid a solid foundation with smart equipment, a comprehensive automation portfolio and the first digital services in operation.

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Basic knowledge digitalization

Milling industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 stands for the "fourth industrial revolution". The first industrial revolution was characterized by mechanization, the second by mass production and the third by automation. The milling industry has also gone through these three phases and is now facing the fourth revolution.

Industry 1.0

Mechanical production powered by water, steam and wind.

Industry 2.0

Mass production thanks to division of labor and electrical energy.

Industry 3.0

Electronics and IT enable a higher degree of automation of your mill.

Industry 4.0

Digital services based on IoT increase production efficiency and speed.

What are the benefits of digitalization?

48 %
less downtime
49 %
less errors
18 %
less energy consumption

From the automated to the digital mill

Modern mills are largely automated. This means that they are controlled centrally. Most of the individual processes run independently.

Digitalization goes a big step further as mills will be equipped with additional services in the future. These services and data make it possible to monitor and analyze every step of the mill's work process using the Internet of Things - e.g. yield data, electricity consumption, environmental conditions or product characteristics such as water absorption or ash content.

The goal is the smart mill, in which all data is consistently collected and evaluated to enable autonomous operation of a mill. In the first stages results become comparable - over time and between different locations. You can set benchmarks, detect anomalies and estimate trends. Then actions are carried out automatically on the basis of the information obtained. The smart mill continuously optimizes itself and learns new things.

Your "intuition" and process know-how as a miller will remain indispensable in the future. The digitalization of the mill provides you with important characteristic data and helps you to make the right decisions even faster.

Four steps to a smart mill

Level 1

Automation

Tailored machine and process automation solutions to help you maximize uptime and optimize performance.

Level 2

Assistance

Data transparency collected from machinery and production data for informed decisions and predictive actions.

Level 3

Self-optimizing process loops

Machine and process optimization in closed loops through product and external data.

Level 4

Smart mill

Fully autonomous mill operation with intelligent, self-learning algorithms.

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How can we help?


Gupfenstrasse 5
Uzwil
9240
Switzerland