Autonomous Milling is the common future vision for the milling industry of Option 4.0 and the world market leader in milling technology Bühler. By combining SmartMill services with the latest AI technologies, we aim to create a fully optimized and waste-reducing mill. Bühler Insights, powered by Microsoft Azure, forms the foundation of our solution, with Azure DevOps managing operations. Our goal: significantly reduce power consumption, water usage, and food waste for safe, high-quality food for all.

The challenge of feeding a growing population is one of the most critical issues of our time, and we are committed to being part of the solution. Our current project at Bühler is a prime example of this mission in action. We are proud to support Bühler as they work to feed over 2 billion people safely, while achieving their ambitious sustainability targets of reducing energy, water, and waste by 50% in the value chain of their customers. At Option 4.0, we believe that technology can play a key role in addressing the challenges of global food security, and we are dedicated to being part of the solution.

The SmartMill services we have developed based on the Bühler Insights platform are transforming not only Bühler, but also their own clients: the milling companies.. This is because Bühler mills currently grind around 65% of the wheat harvested worldwide. Our technology is helping to improve the efficiency and productivity of milling operations, enabling companies to reduce waste and optimize their processes.

By collecting, visualizing, and analyzing data from the production process, we can offer Bühler customers a suite of digital services powered by Microsoft Azure that help to optimize production efficiency, achieve constant product quality, with 48% less downtime, 49% less errors and 18% less energy consumption.

Bühler Insights and its analytical extensions are built using a broad palette of cloud-native services, such as Azure IoT Hub, Data Explorer, Azure Functions, Event Hubs, API management and many more. We have been implementing Azure Data Explorer as our analytics cloud platform of choice for time series data.

Optimized for ad-hoc big data queries, we can leverage the platform to develop services with real time results for the users. We have optimized the collection and processing of large amounts of data from the machinery and its sensors in mills towards the Bühler IoT platform. It is used to collect and analyze data from multiple sources. The use cases which we have been evaluating with customers of Bühler all around the world are using now Azure Data Explorer in the IoT space for monitoring devices and analyzing milling data. With Azure Data Explorer, we analyze large volumes of streaming data from applications, websites, and IoT devices in near real-time to serve analytics applications and dashboards. For more information about this solution: