Services
From milling to die casting, from North America to Southeast Asia, manufacturers in diverse industries and regions share one desire – to build sustainable long-term success. With Bühler services, they can reach their goals. Designed to drive growth while lowering footprint, our service portfolio offers a spectrum of possibilities, supporting customers to build resilience, unlock profitable success, and boost their business.
Janet Anderson, November 2025
Do you want to increase yield and efficiency, reduce operational costs, improve quality, unlock growth, and improve the resilience of your business? Are you wondering whether you can achieve these goals and improve safety or lower your footprint at the same time? Bühler’s comprehensive portfolio of services, offered through a unique global network, is designed to help customers everywhere to optimize their footprint and improve business performance. Whether you are looking for a maintenance contract, equipment upgrade, training for your staff, or advice on process improvements, Bühler experts are at your side showing you that sustainability goals and business success go hand in hand. With deep expertise across many manufacturing processes, Bühler service people know about the specific challenges customers face and apply their wide experience to help find durable solutions.
Take upgrades as an example. Of all the services that a manufacturer requires, retrofits and upgrades provoke the most emotion. At some point, a tried and trusted machine shows signs of age and no longer performs at its best – productivity is declining, energy consumption is increasing, maintenance costs are growing. At this point, you face an urgent question: do I invest in new machines, or opt for an overhaul and upgrade? This was the question facing Ching Ming Group in China. The company started in 1968 as a small machining workshop with five Bühler Evolution 42 die-casting machines. Since then, it has grown into a well-known regional supplier of hardware die castings. In Mr. Wang’s point of view – Ching Ming Group’s General Manager – their Bühler machines are just like old friends.
“They have accompanied us throughout our development,” he says. But issues such as hydraulic oil leakage and declining precision were restricting production efficiency and product quality. In weighing up whether to go for a retrofit or invest in new machines, Mr. Wang and his colleagues were supported by Bühler experts. They carried out a comprehensive health check-up to identify the root causes of problems before tailoring targeted solutions. They also provided a detailed analysis of the potential return on investment and proposed a work schedule to minimize production downtime.
On this basis, Ching Ming Group opted for a retrofit, breathing new life into three of their die-casting machines. The issues were all resolved, but more than that, their machines now use 20 percent less energy and there are fewer product defects.
The savings from these improvements will enable Ching Ming Group to recover the retrofitting investment quickly, and with the hands-on training provided by the Bühler team, Ching Ming Group now has an in-house team of experts.
Retrofitting is just one example of the Bühler services portfolio, but it demonstrates how close collaboration with customers achieves a holistic outcome. The goal of services is not just to extend the service life of customers’ machines, or to reduce operation costs and energy consumption – far more than that, it is to help customers maximize the value of their investment over the entire life cycle of their assets and, through proactive engagement, to ensure the long-term success of customers’ businesses.
“This is the core value of services in the manufacturing industry,” says James Zuo, Head of Service Operation, Bühler Greater China. “Earning our customers’ trust and satisfaction is the pinnacle of our achievement and the essence of our value.”
Bühler’s service offering includes everything from spare and wear parts, inspection, and maintenance to equipment upgrades and consultancy. Customers can select a package of these services tailored to their specific requirements. Bühler’s global setup, together with digital and remote services, ensures prompt availability at every customer location, serving customers’ needs seamlessly from asset and process optimization to output-based and business optimization services.
Just as the Ching Ming Group found, an important part of the service offering also includes knowledge sharing. Bühler’s experts provide both technical know-how as well as valuable insights into the latest market developments, supporting customers to achieve short- and long-term goals. They also help develop competencies within customers’ own businesses with classroom instruction, e-learning, and on-site training that provide the skills and knowledge for long-term sustainable success.
With 2,200 Bühler experts, 105 service stations, three Customer Operations Centers in different regions providing remote support and digital services, and 30,000 different parts in stock across 10 locations, Bühler can deliver the right bundle of services to each of its customers worldwide. Today, Bühler has long-term service agreements in place with more than 3,000 customers.
“We fully understand that as manufacturers, all of our customers need to produce their products as efficiently as possible and at a defined quality, says Patrik Meier, Global Director of Product Development at Bühler. “Each of our customers has to meet other requirements and goals too, which might include food safety or sustainability, but fundamentally, they are all looking to produce more for less.” Bühler’s service portfolio delivers this – whether that means lower costs or a lower environmental footprint, or both. The key is that Bühler experts take the time to understand fully how customers operate their plants and machines before proposing how to improve outcomes.
The proposal might be to ensure that the customer’s machines are working at their optimum and will continue to do so for as long as possible, or it might involve looking at processes, such as flow of product or raw materials, and proposing an optimization. This could lead to exploring ways to reduce or reuse side streams and energy. “Everything that flows through the customer’s process has value, and ideally there should be no waste. We therefore work to reuse and valorize as much as possible, putting the concept of the circular economy into practice,” says Meier.
A perfect example of how business and sustainability goals are closely linked is energy consumption. “For most customers, energy has a big financial as well as environmental impact,” says Meier. In most cases, heat is the biggest consumer of energy and after that mechanical drive. Bühler experts therefore prioritize improving heat consumption followed by movements and mechanical stresses.
This cuts cost and emissions, but there can be even more benefits. An oven, for example, is a big heat sink, so it is important to optimize that part of the production process first. This involves ensuring that no part of the process uses unnecessarily high temperatures. This leads to reductions in both energy costs and footprint, but that is not all. By achieving more even heat distribution, it is possible to get closer to the required recipe every time and therefore also improve the quality of the output.
“Our approach is holistic because, for our customers, these aspects are all connected,” says Meier. “Each of the customer’s machines is part of an overall process. If we improve one machine, we ensure that this has a good overall impact across the customer’s whole value chain. If we enable the customer to reduce their water consumption, this reduces their environmental impact and their costs.”
Customers’ needs vary according to industry, region, and business, and therefore Bühler’s service portfolio is highly adaptable. “Our customers are in different industries with different pressures, and they are also at different stages in their journeys,” says Meier. “Many of our customers are established producers, whose main focus is on improving their current operation or growing their business. We also have customers who are looking to expand into new market segments. And we help businesses at the very beginning of their journey, the start-ups. We build our service offering around each customer’s needs,” says Meier. Bühler also customizes the service package according to regional needs. For example, in some regions, customers place more focus on waste reduction and productivity improvements. In others, the priority is on skills development to help improve the conversion of raw materials to final product.
“We design our service packages to deliver the outcomes our customers require,” explains Onkare Gowda, Head of Service Operations, Middle East, Africa & India, at Bühler. “In the regions I serve, our customers may be looking to expand their businesses into international markets. We offer them services to help them do this by enabling them to meet international standards, including sustainability requirements.”
Another important aspect is providing support throughout this process. “We work with our customers, offering accountability and commitment and helping them to take these steps,” says Saurabh Soni, Head of Service Sales & Channel Management, Middle East, Africa & India, at Bühler.
Supporting you in reducing operational costs in your production.
Ensuring safety for your personnel, machines, and the environment.
Enabling you to improve availability and reliability to keep production running smoothly.
Helping increase the output of your production in volume or product diversity.
Supporting you in strengthening food safety and ensuring compliance.
Helping you drive more sustainable production, reducing energy, waste, water, and CO2e.
In Southeast Asia, the drive toward sustainability sometimes comes from customers themselves, and sometimes from external factors. The Malaysian government, for example, provides grants for projects that reduce energy consumption. And in Australia, the steep rise in energy costs drives customers toward the same goal. “There is huge diversity across these regions and that requires tailor-made services,” says Jin Kit Chua, Regional Head of Services Sales, Southeast Asia, at Bühler. “That is why we always sit down and listen to our customers’ pains before we propose a service package.”
Customers in Europe are driven by a wide mix of factors, from regulations, financing, and requirements of their own customer base to how they position their brand in their market. Customers who serve big supermarket chains, for example, need to meet certain sustainability requirements. Customers who provide volume products know that cost is the biggest driver.
“We understand that there is a variety of drivers for our customers. But we also know that for all of them, sustainability must have a business case behind it,” explains Livia Hoehener, Head of Customer Service Europe at Bühler. “Our customers are looking at the return on investment, so we always measure performance and make improvements tangible for them.”
In some cases, providing services becomes a deeper partnership. For example, a customer might want to improve energy efficiency but lack the personnel to track and analyze the data. In these cases, Bühler can act as a companion, helping them interpret the information and make decisions. “Due to the skills shortage in our industries in Europe, for example, many of our customers here are looking for partnership. With Bühler’s deep process knowledge we can help our customers decide which data points will give them valuable results,” Hoehener explains.
With transparency, trust, and regular alignment on expectations, the partnership can become a form of co-creation. This involves learning together, adjusting along the way, and sharing the risk. “With Outcome as a Service, we as Bühler have skin in the game – we share the risk with our customers,” says Hoehener. “We are prepared to do this because we are confident of what we can achieve together.”
Enabling you to innovate, develop, and test new products and processes.
Helping you to increase the quality of your production output on a consistent basis.
Enhancing your assets to extend their productive lifetime.
Process Improvement and Environmental Impact Services
Bühler’s Environmental Impact Services together with process improvement link business objectives with sustainability targets. With the support of our experts, customers can quantify and understand the environmental footprint of their operations and products, identify where the real levers for decarbonization, resource efficiency, and cost reduction lie, and build a practical strategy to achieve reductions annually. The identified opportunities are then realized through process modifications, optimization, and maintenance activities under Bühler’s service solutions such as Total Care.
Remote Support
Every hour your production stands still, you lose money. With remote support Bühler can reduce that quickly. Bühler’s global network of Customer Operation Centers gives you access to remote services in your regional language, in your time zone, 24/7. With Bühler experts connected to your operation, they can look at the production data and analyze the issue. Often, they can resolve the problem without sending a technician to the site. Cutting travel saves time, cost, and emissions.
Total Care
Maintenance is the bedrock of Bühler services. Whether it's new parts, a software update, or machine maintenance, we deliver what you need as fast as possible, at the best quality and price. Through our global network of hundreds of field service engineers, supported in selected markets by our subsidiary BenLink, we ensure fast, high-quality service worldwide. But Bühler’s services go beyond this. With a Total Care service agreement, our experts are not just available to solve problems but are at your side looking for ways to make improvements in your assets, processes, and overall business. From training to process support, analytics and beyond, we collaborate with you to make sure you are successful over the whole of your asset lifecycle.
Energy consumption reduced by 20%
Ching Ming Group, based in Dongguan, China relies on three Bühler Evolution 420 die-casting solutions to produce screws, fasteners, and tools. After years of reliable service, the company saw an opportunity to improve performance either through replacement or retrofit. Working with Bühler experts and making in-depth calculations, Ching Ming Group weighed the options. Retrofitting proved to be the best course of action – and the results speak for themselves. Overall energy consumption dropped by 20 percent, while overall equipment effectiveness rose from 65 percent to 85 percent. This led to a return of investment in just 14 months, more than justifying the investment in upgrading rather than replacing the machines. The lifespan of Ching Ming’s equipment has been extended by 8 to 10 years, giving them peace of mind and the readiness to grow their business with cost-effective technology.
20% reduction in production losses
Grupo Marilan is a Brazilian food manufacturer that specializes in producing a wide variety of savory biscuits, sweet cookies, and other snacks. It is the largest biscuit maker in Brazil with more than 5,000 employees and exports its products to over 30 countries. Grupo Marilan set a strategic goal of increasing the reliability and availability of its wafer lines to enhance operational stability and achieve its wafer segment growth targets. With Bühler’s Total Care service package, Grupo Marilan found the perfect fit for proactive asset management and predictive maintenance to improve its production performance. Since integrating Total Care, the company has experienced exceptional results, including a 20 percent reduction in production losses including scraps, sweeps, and overfill. These improvements – along with increased line availability, optimized operating costs, and enhanced plate cleaning – have boosted overall equipment efficiency, and strengthened sustainability and competitiveness.
50% emission reduction in purchasing and logistics by 2030 (target)
Royal Koopmans looks back at 180 years of family-owned company history, evolving from a horse-powered mill into a modern supplier of flour, food coatings, and ingredient solutions to artisanal bakeries and industrial food producers.
By developing innovative grain-based solutions, Royal Koopmans meets evolving consumer demands for tasty, healthy, and sustainable food. Guided by an unwavering commitment to sustainability in every decision, the company collaborates closely with farmers, organizations, and partners in the supply chain to enhance its impact.
With support from Bühler’s Environmental Impact Service team, Royal Koopmans has embarked on a journey to fully understand its greenhouse gas footprint (GHG) across Scopes 1, 2 and 3. These insights are crucial to understanding the departure point (baseline) and how each link in the chain contributes to Koopmans’ overall CO2e emissions, enabling the company to define a clear emission reduction strategy, and set challenging yet achievable goals in the areas where the biggest impact can be achieved. Currently, Bühler is calculating the impact of Koopmans’ climate strategy to evaluate the impact reduction, assess potential gaps towards its climate goals and crystallize the steps going forward. This will support Koopmans in achieving their ambitious goals: reaching net zero emissions in their own operations (Scopes 1 and 2) by 2040 and cutting emissions in purchasing and logistics by 50 percent by 2030.
13 pairs of rolls exchanged in just 2.5 days
As one of the world’s largest nutrition companies, ADM is a leader in both human and animal nutrition. Covering the full value chain from farm to fork, ADM recognizes the importance of regularly assessing its processes to get the most out of every production day. Bühler experts met with ADM technical support and plant management at their Beech Grove Mill in Indiana, US about trialing a new maintenance concept. The idea was to change out a larger quantity of milling rolls than normal on maintenance days. RollDetect was used to help determine which rolls to change that would make the biggest impact to capacity and yield of the specific Milling unit.
To minimize operational downtime, ADM plant management worked with Bühler customer service to design a detailed plan to exchange the rolls during the day then allow the mill to run over night to test the efficiency gains. Thirteen pairs of rolls were exchanged in only 2.5 days with a direct impact on milling performance. According to Nicholas Johnson, Mill Superintendent at ADM Milling in Beech Grove, the results were immediate: “The Mill received a significant increase in yield and capacity after the maintenance was performed.” With ADM’s commitment to maintain its mill at the highest level of production and efficiency, the company is set to continue reaping the rewards of this new maintenance concept. Prior this type of maintenance could take months of scheduled repair time.
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