There’s a good chance you have already heard of Vanderlande. This company, with around 50 branches worldwide, is the global market leader in the construction of baggage handling systems. Their systems, which move nearly 4.2 billion pieces of luggage per year, operate in 600 airports around the globe, including 13 of the world’s top 20. Aside from this, Vanderlande makes material handling systems (MHS) for warehousing, e-commerce, and the postal and parcel delivery sector. René: “One of the several things that makes Vanderlande special is its combination of logistics and IT and the innovation we bring to this. After all, IT is becoming ever more important to us.”
The right mix
Vanderlande keeps a portion of its IT in-house and outsources another part. “We always keep some of it in-house to ensure that we retain certain knowledge in the company. Beyond this, we work with a flexible layer of preferred suppliers for specific areas of knowledge. In the case of escalations, major projects, or staff replacement in the event of illness, for example, we automatically rely on Centric. If there is something wrong with our ERP system, we turn to our ERP partner. The advantage of this approach is that it enables us to benefit from our partners’ expertise. Because, for a party like Centric, IT is core business; you know better than anyone which innovations are relevant and which are not. So, I strongly believe in the mix.”
High-quality professionals
Some ten Centric professionals are working at Vanderlande (at the time of writing). René: “They help us with internal IT, so workspace and system management around the globe. In total we are talking about 7000 workspaces. The number of Centric people that we procure also fluctuates. If we receive a lot of demand via client projects, for example, we will scale up. So, we also call on external Centric people.” When asked why the company always turns to Centric, René answers: “When working with external professionals, it is of course especially important that the quality of the people is high. That’s the starting point. And this is certainly true with Centric. Not only are they well equipped technically, they also have good social skills. And that’s important given that they have to work closely with our people and clients. If I compare you with other parties in the knowledge area, I think that Centric is able to deliver just a bit more in terms of size and diversity, both for our internal IT and for our client projects.”
