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- Hi, everybody. I'm Judson Althoff.
I'm delighted to be here with Stuart Bashford,
who is the Chief Digital Officer for Buhler Group.
Before we kinda get into the tech and all the cool things you're doing,
tell us a little bit, macro level, about Buhler and the company
and your mission. - Okay, sure.
Buhler Group is the number one technology provider
into the food and feed processing industry.
65% of the world's grain goes through Buhler equipment.
- Wow. - So we're a privately-owned
Swiss-based company.
We're on the fifth generation of the Buhler family,
and they take sustainability very seriously.
In fact, they drive us equally hard on sustainability as they do on profits.
So for us, how do you feed the planet in 2050?
We have to reduce waste. We have to increase transparency.
- So there's no question the mission that Buhler is on
is, uh, is one that can identify
inside of every consumer, right?
I would never have imagined there was so much digital tech
in what you're doing.
Unpack that for us. - Digital gives us an enormous opportunity
to be able to provide extra insights, more value, more benefits to our customers
right the way along the supply chain.
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We have a portfolio of somewhere around 15 to 20 digital services
that we launched just this year.
One of our popular examples is product in the pet food industry,
and what this allows us to be able to do
is to actually control the output from the system
to control quality right up next to the threshold.
In that particular case, customers can make
somewhere between 6 and $800,000 every single year.
- Wow. - So it's a big deal.
- So there is a real value. - Absolutely.
And today we're working on blockchain.
- Let's pull on that blockchain thread for just a moment.
Why does it make sense for you? - For us,
what we're interested in doing is creating the most transparent
and traceable food supply chain there is.
Food fraud causes the industry about 30 to $40 million every single year.
Product recalls can cost any individual customer
something like $10 million, just for one recall.
And the issue is--is actually that the--
If you start from the origin of the problem,
they can't really track with absolute clarity
exactly where did they get the product.
What that means is, in a product recall situation,
you're talking about huge waste. - Sure.
- So for us, that means distributed ledger.
In addition to that, because, as I said, we actually service
a large amount of the supply chain with our processing equipment,
we can start to think about quality and food safety
because we can attach into our processing equipment
which is all based on our Buhler Insights platform,
which, in turn, is all based on Azure IoT Suite,
which, in turn, integrates very well with the, um, blockchain workbench.
- That's fantastic.
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So...I do genuinely have to say that
you've done one of the best jobs I've seen
at putting technology to work for the business
and really applying the same to actual outcomes and impact.
There are plenty of companies out there trying to do the same thing.
What advice would you have for your peers?
- In terms of advice, I would say
don't try and solve all the problems on your own.
I mean, we certainly haven't.
We started working much closer with Microsoft
probably about 2 1/2 years ago.
We see a huge amount of productivity increase to our projects
because of the help you give us, the tools that you provide,
including things like artificial intelligence,
advanced data analytics.
And I'm not just saying that because you're here talking to me.
It's real.
Also, don't overthink some of your decisions.
Be agile. Faster to market is probably more important
than anything else right now.
- Hey, listen, I can't tell you enough about how impressed I am
about the work that you're doing.
Thank you for the partnership
and the confidence that you put in Microsoft and the journey.
- Thank you very much. - Awesome.
Thanks, Stuart. - Thanks, Judson. Thank you.
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