Day 3

“They probably think we’re all crazy here!” said one of the employees at Vanderlande industries in the Heathrow office. If one of the employees points at another and introduces you to him as ‘the one that dances like Rihanna’, I may start to think that’s true. Crazy about their job, that is.

Today we travelled in a busy bus at 9 a.m. towards the Vanderlande office. Lotte and I were a little bit early, but otherwise we would have been too late with another bus. We had to sign in on an Ipad and waited until it was time. Then we were introduced to all the people in the office. I didn’t remember any names, but I did get the overall picture of everyone working there. After that we got a presentation about Vanderlande in general together with a new employee. Vanderlande creates intelligent systems that include baggage handling, parcel & postal and warehouse automation. So those clothes in the Urban Outfitters and the Nike store I shopped at the other day were brought there with the help of warehouse automation provided by Vanderlande. They also made sure that our luggage arrived at the right place by the use of robots. Vanderlande has provided systems for the half of Heathrow. Which really is a lot.
After the presentation we went to the ITSD team. They solve the hardware and database problems of the systems. To receive the problems and to get in contact with clients they use database services like Oracle. The problems are mostly being reported automatically by the system. These often are problems that have occurred before, so they can find in the database how it has been solved before. The problems can both be code and material problems. To prevent more people working on the same problem and therefore causing a new problem they put a temporarily lock on the code of a certain element. When they’re done they take the lock off again so other people can access the information again. The only problem is that they have to use multiple database services. So it would have been handier if there was one database with everything combined.

Then we went to the Finance department. Harp, the employee that department told us that finance is actually just common sense and that it’s ‘the best department at Vanderlande’. He told us the basics of finance, like how they get a lot of money of selling extra products and services to the client. I thought at first that you just sell a product or service and that’s it. It’s also important to have a good reputation. There are of course also other companies that want to do the same project. So a good reputation can be in your favour. There are also some companies that try to get a better reputation by adding extra money, which they don’t have. But this ends up in having a worse reputation because finance is often checked. I also learned that you have to sign an agreement so that if either the client or the company doesn’t deliver the money or the service, you can go to court. After his talk about finance, Harp looked at our planning for the rest of the week. His colleagues on the list were introduced to us as ‘the big black Santa Claus’ , ‘The one that dances like Rihanna’ and ‘The one that you’ll need very dark coffe for’. I guess Harp’s function isn’t just working in finance but also as a ‘fulltime colleague namer’.

Overall the Vanderlande office seemed pretty nice and what I have learned today was all quite interesting. Now I hope to find out what my father exactly does at Vanderlande, because I never understood his explanations.