Hi there and welcome to What I Wish I Knew, a
series where we uncover IoT implementation
lessons, advice and the occasional regret
from the innovators leading the way.
I'm Jennie Cady.
And today we sat down with Stuart Bashford of
Buehler, an innovator using IoT to engage
their customers in new ways.
Stuart talks with us about how IoT has
enabled their customers to be more
productive, the vital role company culture
plays in transformation and the need to keep
things simple without forgetting the people
involved in the journey.
So my name is Stuart Bashford.
I'm the digital officer for the Buhler group.
And what that means for us is it's my job to
manage set the vision and direction for our
our digital transformation as a company.
We've been on the journey now for around
about five years.
At that time, digitalisation was big and
looming large in our sort of vision.
We started to have a look at what was out
there and how we could allow or enable our
customers to be more productive.
And that's when we started to think about
IoT and digitalisation and what that meant
for us and more importantly, of course, what
it means for our customers.
Keep it simple, so keep your
technological ideas simple, keep the business
model simple and strive for business impact
quickly. This is also about the humans
involved. And we ourselves, we've grown to
understand and realize that we don't get
anywhere with our digital solutions if we
don't put equal amount of effort onto
managing those human relationships as well.
Keep it simple and don't forget the human
being. One of the important things with any
digital transformation journey is just the
recognition that, you know, it is a journey.
When we start engaging with our customers,
the first conversations could be about a
specific use case.
But very often after you work on that use
case, you deliver the outcomes from that.
You find out that there's other things that
you can be working on and then the customer
comes to you and says, great, but what if we
could do this and what if we could do that?
And, you know, and that's the great
that's the great place to get to, because
then you're really you're almost creating
solutions together.
And that's where you can, you know, offer the
biggest value to you, to our customers at
least. This journey is a very iterative
process. Be aware that every customer
you talk to, every supplier, every partner,
they are also on a journey and they might be
on that journey a different place than you.
That's one thing.
And then perhaps another thing is just just
think about the cultural and structural sort
of set up of your organizational culture
plays a huge part in how you can transform
the existing sort of norms and the existing
sort of practices within your company to be
able to deliver and offer digital services.
So, I mean, a very interesting thing on that
is very early days in our transformation, our
CEO essentially set all of our all of our
businesses are very unreasonable challenge,
he said, in nine months time.
I want you to come back and I want you to
demonstrate your digital services to me.
I don't want to see PowerPoint slides.
I want to see digital services.
So, you know, in that respect, it was
unreasonable. But the very cool thing about
it was it mobilized action and it also meant
every single business had to deliver
something. Nine months later, we got
somewhere around about eight real customer
services. And I think maybe three of them
have now turned into products that we
actually sell.
So, you know, a success story there.
The very obvious thing there is when we
initially engage with our customers, it's
usually centered around a few more of the
more obvious benefits.
You know, we're going to reduce unplanned
downtime as a key one.
Energy usage is getting into the
spotlight these days with the sustainability
stuff and things.
But having connected machines, I mean, you
have to look at this within the context.
We usually make big machines.
They weigh a ton to up to 50 tons.
We sell them and one of transactional
business models.
But as soon as you make those machines
connected and you have the ability to be able
to sell a service where we're constantly
monitoring the machine to make sure it's
operating to its best possible parameters,
that then kicks off what we call a digital
relationship with the customer.
But what we really mean is we are really
strengthening that relationship with the
customer. And that just takes you on.
I mean, I keep using it, but it takes you on
a further along that journey of really
working together as a partnership to make
your business as productive as it can
possibly be.
What always surprises me is when we engage with
customers and we take them on a spiritual
journey and they and they suddenly delight
the sort of the switch flicks and they
suddenly realize, oh, but we could do
this and we could do that.
And if we only had that bit of data or that
we could do this.
And I think, again, that's something that by
having this very agile approach of of of
providing a service to our customers and
being able to adapt it to what they really
need, what that may also means is that we can
adapt what we're offering to offer them the
next thing.
But then we have to we talk with the customer
and say, look, we're monitoring the service
and we're curious, you know, we don't quite
see the benefits that we think you should
be able to get.
And after a while, it sort of transpires that
the customer wasn't always using the service.
They don't need, you know, some software
telling them how to do their job.
So they would much rather be assessed on
their performance.
So they were switching off the service.
That automatically adjusted some things
because they had full confidence in their
abilities. And, you know, and so there we had
to talk, you know, go back and use the fact
that we had these connected products to use a
human being.
You know, you're talking about lots of
digital technologies.
But again, you know, this come back to a
human being, having a conversation with a
customer, exploring where the problem is, and
then talking with the shift operators and
saying, look, you know, we still need you
guys. You guys still need to be a very
important part of this process.
But if you just let the machine do the job
here in this part, it can optimize that
whilst you're doing some more value added
tasks elsewhere.
That's one of those sort of stories
that I can sort of relate to and, you know,
could be of use to others.
Just recently, one of our one of our
customers got every single one of them had
been one of our customers for a while on the
digital services, but that made the
commitment to get every single one of their
manufacturing plants connected.
And one of the exciting things for me was to
sort of see I got sent a photograph from from
this particular customer where they had a
picture of our, you know, our Buhler
Insight's platform in their headquarters.
And this meant everyone that comes in through
their front door sees effectively our Buhler
Insight's dashboard, which shows all of their
production sites running around North
America, actually, in this case, having
multiple sites, being able to look exactly
what's going on at a line level, a plant
level, a line level and machine level.
And what we'd always said is if you could put
your best operator working on your machines
every single second of the day, you would
have better production, wouldn't you?
I mean, that's and the answer to that is,
yes, you would, but you can't do that with
human beings, but you can do it with digital
services. And this is exactly what we were
showing. And they show this dashboard and it
just proved this.
And so very, very, very pleasing moment.
And what's even more pleasing as we go
forward in time, even past that?
You know, they absolutely love the visibility
they get on their process
lines. I mean, that's that's
demonstrated the worth of the worth of the
system. I know we perhaps could have done a
few things a little differently.
I mean, one of the key things I would say we
we had seen buy in from the very top of our
company, from the board of directors,
executive board, right from the very
beginning. And that is an absolute essential.
I hear stories of companies trying to go
through a digital transformation without
having support at the top.
And that must be very hard.
Well, we didn't have that situation of Buhler.
We had very, very lucky to have full support
at that senior level.
And then I think another important thing
would be just to have a very, very clear
understanding of why you're you're doing this
and what you want to achieve, which sounds
very sounds simple if you have a very clear
understanding of where and why it keeps you
keeps you pointing in the right direction.
Thank you for joining us.
And be sure to check out other stories from
IoT innovators so that you can take your
vision to reality with secure, scalable and
open edge to cloud solutions to learn more
about the solutions that Buhler implemented.
Be sure to check out their case study and
other resources linked here, or visit Azure.com
for additional IoT solutions and
services.