MechChem Africa January-February 2025

⎪ Local manufacturing and food processing ⎪

Left: A precision machined fluted mill roll with flutes perfectly aligned for optimal performance once put back into service. Right: A Bühler machining station at the Johannesburg manufacturing facility.

also offers customised repair and refurbish ment 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 sys tems 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 work shops and deals with customer services and the manufacture of OEM spares. “We have a continuous operation for rebuilding, flut ing 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 sourc ing 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 scrap ers 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 com plete 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 prod ucts is changing the nature of servicing and lifecycle management of Bühler machines: towards being much more proactive and predictive. Increasingly, Bühler is incorpo rating 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 interac tions 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-per forming and so finding ways of eliminating bottlenecks. “For top level management at board meet ings, it is fantastic to be able to highlight the efficiency of a mill in real time: the power consumption; the mill yields; the energy ef ficiency; and the production costs of all the dif ferent 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 appren ticeship 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, indepen dent 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 bring ing that vision into Southern Africa, through servicing solutions for installed assets that deliver productivity and up-time improve ments. And we are open to jointly develop new concepts and to address local challenges and targets,” concludes Marco Sutter. www.buhlergroup.com Buhler manganese-steel bars and chain links for conveyor systems in the South African mining industry.

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