On June 4, 2025, Andritz Schuler Inc. and Andritz BCN Inc., subsidiaries of the Andritz Schuler Group, welcomed customers, partners, staff and members of the media at their Michigan Ave. service facility in Canton, Mich., for an educational workshop. The event showcased an expanded portfolio of service offerings made possible thanks to the companies’ full integration with the Andritz Group. Attendees also learned about the companies’ full operational capabilities and the paths they’re paving for the future direction of the stamping industry.
Ushering in a new era
Andritz Group acquired Schuler in 2013. Since announcing a full brand integration in early 2025, Andritz Schuler Inc., historically known to customers as Schuler North America, set a date to set the new tone for the company moving forward. And the timing was right. In the past three years, the company’s service business has grown by 80 percent, and with a new package of service offerings available, company leadership expects it to grow even more.
Throughout the full-day workshop, Andritz Schuler Inc. and Andritz BCN (previously known as BCN Technical Services) outlined the new era of stamping – one driven by digitalization and automation and designed with the industry’s labor challenges in mind.
“These solutions are customer- and technology-driven,” explained Kevin McAllister, president of North America, at the beginning of the day. “A big part of our business and our focus is supporting customers, so a big topic for today is supporting them with lifecycle services – versus delivering projects and then telling customers they’re on their own.”
Providing service throughout the lifecycle of a press was always a priority for the two companies, but now that Andritz is in the picture, that support has been amplified. Worldwide, the company employs 30,000 staff in more than 80 countries.
“This [relationship] has extended our reach at Schuler,” McAllister said. “[Previously], we were in more than 40 countries, but now with Andritz, we’ve doubled our global presence.”
Service hubs
Currently, the Andritz Schuler service business is focused on supporting the more than 150,000 presses that are installed around the globe, but the company is gearing up to provide even more tailored support. Locally speaking, company expansions across the United States are facilitating faster responses in the form of spare parts, field service, retrofits and modernization, as well as training.
In North America, field offices are currently open in Missouri; Michigan; Texas; Arizona; Ontario, Canada; Puebla, Mexico; Querétaro, Mexico; and Saltillo, Mexico. At the workshop, a new facility, planned for the end of 2025, in the U.S. southeast was also announced.
These field offices, exemplified by the Canton service facility where Andritz Schuler hosted the workshop, serve as hubs for a variety of customer needs. The 32,000-sq.-ft. Canton facility, which was acquired in 2021, is dedicated to field service and technical support where customers can obtain training, product demos, spare parts and specialized equipment. It also features 5-ton, 10-ton and 50-ton cranes as well as a dedicated press pit for press rebuilds and assemblies of nearly any size.
“When we acquired [this facility] back in 2021 during Covid, everybody else was cutting costs,” McAllister explained. “But we recognized the need to get a facility like this and got support from the [Andritz] board at the time.”
For customers that aren’t in the vicinity of one of the many service facilities, company reps will, of course, make service calls. In fact, servicing, inspecting, repairing and retrofitting machines has been the bread and butter for the teams at both companies for decades.
“We offer spare parts, inspections, field services and modernizations,” said Carlos Valdes, managing director at Andritz BCN, during the event. “Some of the presses [we work on] in the market are more recent and some are very old – from the 1950s and 1960s, but they’re still working. They all need required spare parts, but others need a lot of engineering because they don’t have modern controls or all of the safety features we need today. Over the years, many of the mechanical parts of these [older] presses have been modified.”
Parts on the ready
To provide customers with the spare parts they need, Andritz Schuler and Andritz BCN have gone to great lengths to beef up and modernize their spare parts system. They not only have a massive inventory of spare parts – 15,000 stateside with additional parts housed in Germany – but they have also added QR codes to parts to expedite the ordering process.
When a customer scans a part, an email is automatically generated to request a new one. The team will also help customers create a “critical spares” list for the main parts they’ll need, including those needed for the 50-plus-year-old “grandpa presses” still on the market.
Speaking of which, Andritz is also digitizing machine blueprints for presses going back nearly 100 years. To date, the company has more than 16 million digitized prints on file, which engineers can reference for repairs, part fabrications and more.
For the customers that require service for a Clearing-brand (the C in BCN) Torc-Pac 40, Andritz BCN is streamlining that, too. Identifying the parts that need to be replaced can be challenging even for veteran staff, but with access to the huge new catalog of blueprints, diagnosing issues is made much easier.
Breathing new life
During the workshop, several impressive examples were given to showcase the type and range of projects both companies are willing to take on. Matthias Wildermuth, project engineering manager of automation and digitalization at Andritz Schuler, and Paul Gleeson, head of outsides sales at Andritz BCN, outlined those case studies. Examples included updated controls to a variety of hydraulic, stamping, forging, minting and even competitor presses and full machine modernizations and retrofits, including the integration of automation systems and the full replacement of all cables and devices.
The two presenters also mentioned the repair of a 1960s-era press used for food packaging, highlighting the team’s willingness to help customers in any way they can. While not explicitly spelled out during the presentation, the general feeling among attendees was that every press deserves a shot at a new life.
To determine that, the next set of presenters explained the company’s “Service Made for You” philosophy. For the Service Made for You presentation, Gleeson joined Peter Pfund, head of field service, and Rodrigo DePaula Branco, mechanical and hydraulic engineering group lead, Andritz Schuler, to explain that all service work – control upgrades, rebuilds and repairs, relocations, hydraulic upgrades, clutch and break replacements and automation retrofits – starts with a comprehensive inspection.
The newly announced relationship with Andritz was especially apparent when discussing the inspection process. With a fully connected global team, inspectors can easily access reports from around the world, which is incredibly helpful considering many machines in the field can experience the same problems for the same reasons. After the initial inspection is completed, customers receive a full report that outlines the needs and recommendations required to bring the press up to modern expectations.
The scope of the work under the Service Made for You umbrella includes field service, welding repair, inspections, predictive maintenance and emergency repairs. The three presenters also said that this portfolio of services can be provided to any stamping press, regardless of the brand.
At your service
In addition to breathing new life into a press, the workshop highlighted Andritz Schuler’s robust Service Agreements, which can be customized according to customer needs to keep their new or new-to-them press in good working order. All Service Agreements include a personal company representative for continuity, time savings and trust as well as reduced costs for spare parts.
Tailored additions to a Service Agreement range from around-the-clock remote support to safety checks, field services, on-site training, and digitalization and modernization work. The latter could include implementing IoT sensors, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and beyond – all of which can help address skilled labor shortages and reduce downtime. The companies’ Visual Die Protection (VDP) system, a camera-based monitoring system designed to protect dies, is also available, which was also designed to minimize or eliminate downtime while preventing machine failure or damage.
“Really, [everything we do] is about working with our customers to help them solve their issues and achieve long-term profitable growth,” McAllister said. “We help our customers reduce downtime and increase efficiency.”
