Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
Vanderlande Industries has been active at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol since 1967, as a preferred supplier of baggage handling systems. BAGTRAX and TUBTRAX DCV-solutions were implemented, as well as automated storage with BAGSTORE. Over these decades, the role of preferred supplier has evolved into a partnership. Multi-year plans for both Baggage Handling Systems and Operations & Maintenance were developed, such as the 70 MB program.
Schiphol’s challenging strategic plan to prepare for a future of 70 million bags per year and significant performance improvement of the baggage process has brought several highlights with the South Baggage Hall as the most recent one. This project is a worldwide showcase of innovation and automation in the baggage handling process, where bags are handled through a pull process (Baggage-on-demand) with the use of BAGSTORE storage systems and BAGLOAD robot loading. This concept was awarded the Innovation prize at the inter Airport Europe 2011 exhibition. Earlier highlights have been the additional capacity in screening clusters for transfer baggage.
The final piece of the 70 MB program is referred to as the Backbone project. With this baggage system all of Schiphol’s baggage systems are linked, allowing bags to move with high speed to all the various gates of Schiphol without human intervention.
In addition to a partnership in baggage system development, Vanderlande Industries has been preferred supplier in the area of Operations and Maintenance. Besides the traditional preventive and corrective maintenance activities there is a daily focus on operations improvement. This ‘every day better’ mentality is best captured in the closed loop improvement cycle (ITIL based*) where process engineers focus on process and system improvement.
* ITIL: Information Technology Infrastructure Library; a set of concepts and practices for IT Services Management (ITSM), IT development and IT operations.
