One of the aims of this work is to show that thermal softening due to the reduced flow strength of a material with increasing temperature may cause chip serrations to form during machining. The other purpose, the main focus of the paper, is to demonstrate that a non-local temperature field can be used to control these serrations. The non-local temperature is a weighted average of the temperature field in the region surrounding an integration point. Its size is determined by a length scale. This length scale may be based on the physics of the process but is taken here as a regularization parameter.