Miller Milling
The story of how the fourth largest miller in the US became the world’s most digitally advanced milling company using Bühler solutions started with a seemingly innocuous conversation. It was an outcome that surprised everyone.
Stuart Spear, March 25, 2021
It is not often as a sales team you get the chance to do something truly radical. To sell a solution to a customer that has the potential to transform an industry. That is what Liam Cassidy and Juan Martinez managed to achieve, following what many would consider an innocuous conversation with a customer about key performance indicators.
Cassidy, Bühler Head of Automation and Martinez, Sales and Account Manager, are part of the Bühler Group team based in Minneapolis, USA, a city that was up until the 1930s, described as the “flour milling capital of the world”. Many of the mills initially attracted to the energy creating potential of St Anthony Falls, the only natural waterfall on the Mississippi, have since moved away or closed. Founded in 1986 Miller Milling is an exception. Based in Bloomington, ten miles south of Minneapolis, Miller Milling is currently the fourth largest wheat miller in the USA, with ambitions to become the world’s largest. Executives at Miller Milling soon realized that their new-found partnership with Bühler would go a long way in helping achieve that ambition.
“We went from an initial conversation with the customer about how they report their key performance indicators, to linking up and streaming data from all their 13 milling units, with Bühler Insights, MyBühler and Bühler Mercury in less than a year,” explains Cassidy. This was a radical change. No other US mill has so far digitalized its processes on such a large scale. From the first conversation to completed implementation of Bühler solutions in all of Miller’s plants across California, Virginia and Texas, took less than a year.
From the start this was never going to be a typical sale. Bühler usually provides its clients with solutions to specific manufacturing challenges. This sale would be about transforming Miller Milling into the world’s most digitally advanced milling company in less than 12 months. Using Bühler Insights, Miller Milling would be able to gather production data from wherever it is possible to place a smart sensor and analyze that data, often in real time, to maximize production efficiency. MyBühler would provide a digital oversight of all data relating to Bühler machines while the Bühler Mercury Execution System would integrate the plant’s control systems with external data on raw materials, resources, storage, logistics and shipping. This was going to involve radical change.
It soon became clear to Cassidy and Martinez that speed would be critical to the sales process. “We realized that they were already talking to another supplier and they were ready to go, which really motivated us to act quickly,” explains Martinez.
“For example, they did not have a Bühler control system and it would normally take months to adapt, but our automation team did a really great job and we had a solution that worked with a non-Bühler control system within just two weeks.”
The milling industry is naturally conservative, often content with using more traditional manufacturing technologies. Miller Milling’s desire to embrace technological change is unusual for the sector. In 2012 it was taken over by the Japanese holding company Nisshin Seifun Group, which also owns Nisshin Flour Milling, Japan’s largest flour miller. “Both Nisshin Groups, the parent company, and Miller Milling, believe IT adoption in the milling industry is far behind other industries and we will only be able to grow a successful business and contribute to a sustainable society by developing IT,” explains Daisuke Ito, Miller Milling Director of Engineering.
Conversations between the Bühler and Miller Milling teams revealed further synergies. In 2019 Bühler tightened its sustainability targets to cut energy consumption, waste, and water usage by 50 percent in its customer value chains. Miller Milling also recognizes sustainability to be key to its evolution. “In reality, if we wish to reduce energy consumption and waste while producing a stable, high quality and safe product for our customers there is no other option than to develop the IT technology.” explains Ito.
Once Miller Milling understood the potential that Bühler could offer, things moved quickly. Cassidy and Martinez proposed a pilot and within two weeks Bühler Insights was connected to one of their plants and analyzing production variables. Then, in late August 2019 the Miller Milling team was invited to the Networking Days event in Uzwil where Bühler Group CEO Stefan Scheiber laid out his vision Bühler’s role in helping achieve global climate change goals.
“As we worked with the Swiss team, we were able to develop a more defined roadmap together and that is when things really took off,” explains Cassidy. “Looking back on this now it is fascinating how all this was happening just based on that one conversation about KPIs. It shows you don’t necessarily have to focus on the technology, but you need to understand what is important to the customer.”
Watch this video that Microsoft made about Miller Milling and its digital journey with Bühler.
Next came a mutual voyage of discovery. It would take a lot of combined brainstorming sessions to utilize the potential of being able to monitor data from any part of the milling production process. “We came together and built a single team, an ecosystem, where we set common goals by breaking down the walls that exist between customer and supplier and so we said, ‘let’s get connected and get your data flowing and then let’s develop systems together’,” explains Cassidy. Everyone involved was starting to understand that building a dashboard is only part of the solution, it is when you collaborate using your joint expertise that the magic starts to happen.
“They really started to open up to us at this stage and explained their long-term vision about how their clients were going to benefit from digitalization, which was ultimately their motivation. It is important to understand how open those conversations were about how we were going to get there and be their partner in the process,” says Martinez.
Both Nisshin Groups, the parent company, and Miller Milling, believe IT adoption in the milling industry is far behind other industries and we will only be able to grow a successful business and contribute to a sustainable society by developing IT.
Daisuke Ito,
Miller Milling Director of Engineering
Next came the implementation process, which had to operate both at the corporate level and deal with the specific needs of individual plants. Miller Milling’s 13 plants are split over five sites, three in California, one in Winchester Virginia and one is Saginaw Texas. Each plant deals with different types of flour and different markets. As conversations took place with different plants the vision started to expand. “We started to understand the customer’s problems. For example, an issue for Miller Milling is that their clients don’t know when the flour is arriving at their plants due to California’s heavy traffic. It would be beneficial if they received a message within a 30-minute window so they can prepare,” says Martinez. Bühler is currently running a pilot in the Los Angeles plant to include trucking data on the system which provides customer alerts around transportation. Change brings disruption and can generate employee anxiety.
Any company embarking on the sort of cultural changes that Miller Milling was considering needs to bring its workforce with it. The Bühler team became part of this process. Initial conversations had taken place at the corporate level but Cassidy and Martinez realized that it was important for the mill operators to see how they would benefit from digitalization.
“We didn’t want a system that just benefited the corporate guys so we launched workshops bringing in the operators, the head millers, the guys who live and breathe the everyday operations and we really focused on showing them how this would benefit them,” says Cassidy. “We wanted to provide that personal touch where we talked to them and once they understood the benefit to them things really started to flip and now, they tell us they can’t imagine life without it.”
These conversations also benefited the Bühler team. Feedback from the front-line operators allowed a better understanding of the practical benefits of digitalization. An example was a plant operator at the Texas plant who would spend the first half hour of a shift change trying to find out what had happened over night. Bühler Insights now provided real time texts through the night making this no longer necessary.
Cassidy and Martinez are keen to emphasize that this is just the start of the story. They are already in conversation with logistic companies about data sources from trucks and are thinking about how to use the technology to reduce the number of hours trucks have to be on the road as part of the sustainability story.
There are also opportunities to start looking at the farming side of the equation. “People talk of farm to fork connectivity, we are not there yet but we are certainly taking a big step in the right direction,” points out Martinez.
And the journey with Miller Milling has also only just begun. “We are not stopping because the client now sees the potential of digital connectivity and we are now moving full speed ahead into other areas, it’s the customer who wants to keep moving forward,” says Cassidy.
Together we formed an ecosystem, where we set common goals by breaking down the walls between customer and supplier.
Liam Cassidy,
Head of Automation at Bühler North America
Miller Milling Company, headquartered in Minneapolis, has 13 mills spread over five plants located in:
Gupfenstrasse 5
Uzwil
9240
Switzerland
