Miller Magazine Issue: 123 March 2020

51 COVER STORY MILLER / MARCH 2020 is nothing homogeneous about the food sector. While Bühler believes that YMS and the added functionality it brings to producers is set to be of interest to a wide range of different food manufacturers, it has chosen to initially concentrate marketing on small- er scale, often family-run milling operations in regions such as Asia, Africa, and India. These are the food producers anticipat- ed to see the greatest production growth in the coming decades as their economies expand. “The good thing about YMS is that you don’t already need to have an automation solution, all you need are the specialized scales such as Bühler’s Tubex Pro and Bühler Insights,” explains Gernot Ruppert, Bühler Product Manager Milling Solutions. “It means smaller com- panies will be able to easily transition from manual records to a system where you can see production rates, last week, last month, and compare what is now being produced using a certain recipe or a certain process. YMS means you can go back in time to see what you produced when and how.” Early on-site installations of Bühler Insights YMS are pro- ducing encouraging results, with the new data streams re- sulting in yield improvements of around 1 percent. Bühler plans to modify and improve the new YMS by the middle of next year so that larger clients, who may already be operating plants with automation solutions can also be con- nected to YMS. “We can see there is a need for customers who already have a yield monitoring system as part of their au- tomation solutions to provide greater transparency,” explains Ruppert. “For example, we have customers with multiple plants in several locations, some with Bühler solutions, some with non-Bühler automation, and some with no automation. These clients are interested in Bühler Insights YMS to be able to monitor and compare yields from all of these plants.” ONLY THE BEGINNING The most powerful functionality of YMS relates to the way that it links to Bühler Insights, an online platform that en- ables customers to collect data and information from their plants and machines. This data is stored on secure servers on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Bühler Insights offers power- ful data analytics and data visualization capabilities with the goal to increase transparency of production processes and make the potential for optimizations visible. Today, 85 per- cent of Bühler machines can be connected to Bühler Insights and benefit from the enhanced data analytics and data vi- sualization capabilities to increase product yield and quality. Part of that process involves using historical data to calculate the most efficient production parameters. So, the longer the YMS is in operation, the more efficient the data analytics algorithms will become. “Once we have enough yield data and are able to detect anomalies, we will be able to better correlate data, analyze parameters and provide feedback to customers based on the monitoring we are doing,” explains Ruppert. The idea is that more efficient algorithms will result in higher yields and hence, greater profit. But there is another rationale for embedding YMS into Bühler Insights. Bühler has set itself a series of sustainability tar- gets to cut water consumption, energy usage and food waste by 50 percent in its customers’ value chains. Bühler Insights is key to achieving this goal as it drives up food production efficiencies. Because of its stand-alone nature and the relative ease with which it can be installed, YMS is able to provide yield production increases to thousands of smaller, manual milling operations that may have previously been unable to benefit from the power of digitalization. By increasing productivity in this harder-to-reach manufacturing community, Bühler is one step closer to achieving its new sustainability goals by 2025. For more information, please contact: Gernot Ruppert, Bühler Program Manager Smart Mill gernot.ruppert@buhlergroup.com, +41 71 955 12 25 or go to https://www.future-of-milling.com/smart-mill/ *Reprint from Diagram #180 ADDED VALUE + Results in yield improvement of around 1% that directly impacts the bottom line. + Allows you to compare yields across production lines using different manufacturing and automation solutions. + Enables smaller companies to easily transition from manual solutions to the benefits of digitalization. + The ability to set alerts when production falls be- low set parameters to enable operators to make immediate adjustments.