When Dorothee Buhmann, Managing Director of Buhmann Systeme GmbH, talks about her company, the story does not begin in production but at the living room table. “The accounting still took place on the living room table,” she recalls. Her father founded the company in 1980, the same year she was born. Today, she leads Buhmann Systeme GmbH in the second generation and has grown alongside the company in many respects.
Mechanical engineering with high in house expertise
Buhmann Systeme is a classic mid sized mechanical engineering company. The business develops and builds packaging machines for the food industry – from design to the finished system. “We build our machines entirely ourselves,” says Buhmann. “We handle mechanical and electrical design, develop the software, manufacture the components and assemble the systems.”
The focus lies on so called end of line packaging solutions: machines that group products and prepare them for transport. “The machines collect products, group them together and pack them into cartons – fully automatically,” she explains. Output rates of several hundred products per minute are not uncommon.
Each system is a unique solution. “Every customer has different requirements,” says Buhmann. “We love technology and really enjoy working with customers to develop exactly the machine that suits their needs.”
Trade fairs as showroom and place of encounter
Precisely because the systems are large, complex, and require explanation, trade fairs play a central role for Buhmann Systeme. Since the 1990s, the company has been exhibiting at FACHPACK, Europe's trade fair for packaging, technology, and processes, and uses the platform specifically for exchange and business development.
“The most important thing is that you can conduct a large number of conversations in a very short time,” says Buhmann. “On the one hand with existing customers, but also to get to know new projects.” Personal interaction is crucial in this context: “The human element is simply indispensable in sales.”
