New perspectives

If you want to be at the cutting edge, you have to be flexible. That applies in particular to business fields that move at breakneck speed – such as automation technology.

And it’s not just technology that is progressing in leaps and bounds. Many players in the industry are proving highly innovative, launching new ideas all the time. To gain focus in the vast field of automation and digitisation of manufacturing and business processes, BMA Automation has now redefined its business goals. 

Diversification in particular is being prioritised. A positive side effect is that it makes us more resilient and better able to respond to business cycles in the sugar industry. But what drives the development is this: by expanding our customer base, we gain insights into related and quite different industries. And these experiences will ultimately be of use in the sugar industry. 

BMA has shown more than once how well such a transfer works. A perfect example: technology transfer from beet to cane sugar production.

Over the past two years, BMA Automation has set many things in motion. We have improved our internal structures and created new roles, enhanced processes, and raised our quality standards. Our concept has also included firmly integrating the international BMA subsidiaries’ expertise and resources. This strategy has paid off – with a growth in expertise and a gain in flexibility throughout the organisation. 

Production has transformed into a state-of-the-art, flexible manufacturing environment. Our work at the CAD workstation is applied directly in the production machinery. Hardware engineering and electrical engineering design have also evolved. 

Today, BMA is successful in the sugar and food industries, the oil and gas sectors, and in the automotive industry. These different fields are linked by automation – in material handling, packaging and power generation, using different, compatible software systems. Because those process steps exist in all sectors. 

And the shift in perspective has already paid off for the sugar industry: BMA has successfully taken a solution that was developed for the automation of material flows in car manufacturing and implemented it in the conveyor system for a beet sugar factory in Russia, where it now controls all material flows from the beet yard to sugar packaging. We have also transferred automation concepts from the oil and gas industries, which are subject to high explosion protection classes, to the packaging plants of a sugar factory in the Middle East. 

BMA Automation’s new setup therefore benefits not only the sugar industry but all customers with complex automation projects – so our plan has worked.