Pune | 6 February 2026: Vanderlande, a material handling and logistics automation company based in Veghel, Netherlands and a subsidiary of Toyota Industries, recently inaugurated its India Innovation Centre in Pune. This two-acre campus marks a shift from the company’s previous India operations, what was a support-focused GCC is now an engineering hub where teams design, test, and deploy warehouse automation systems for global customers.

A Hub for Co-Creation and Advanced Engineering

The Pune facility integrates training, testing, and full-scale system development under one roof. Engineers here work on complete solutions, not just components. The center focuses on three core areas:

1. Robotic automation and autonomous systems: Developing sorting and handling systems that move faster and break less. This includes the physical robotics and the control software that coordinates multiple machines working simultaneously.
2. Artificial intelligence: Building predictive maintenance systems that identify equipment failures before they happen, and intelligent software that optimizes routing and throughput in warehouses and airports.
3. Digital-physical integration: Connecting hardware (conveyors, sorters, robots) with software systems across warehousing, airport baggage handling, and parcel distribution operations.

Strategic Scale: India as the Second-Largest Tech Node

Vanderlande’s India operations are now the company’s second-largest technology hub globally, trailing only their Netherlands headquarters. The Indian team has grown from a small support office into a 1,300+ person organization covering R&D, software development, and shared services – a large team handling complex projects end-to-end without constantly escalating to headquarters.

“For our customers, automation is no longer optional, it is essential. Our Innovation Centre’s are pivotal in creating smarter, more efficient solutions, guided by our core values like Every Day Better focused on continuous improvement and innovation. As our second-largest technology hub, India will further strengthen our global innovation ecosystem through this new centre.”

 – Astrid van Druten, Chief Financial Officer, Vanderlande

“The inauguration of our new India Innovation Centre marks an important milestone that reflects Vanderlande’s confidence and continued investments in Vanderlande India. The centre embodies our ambition to support innovation, build global capabilities, and makes a positive impact on Vanderlande’s worldwide operations.”

– Manish Patil, Managing Director, Vanderlande India

The Operational Breakdown

Ten years ago, most GCCs in India handled support functions – IT helpdesk, back-office processing, basic coding. Today’s centers like Vanderlande that have progressed to bring value to the business, are building innovation centers, where Indian teams own product development from concept to deployment. Below is the operational breakdown of what the Vanderlande’ India Innovation Centre is delivering to business:

1. Drug Development: 3,000 specialists designing clinical trial protocols and managing global trial data. These roles are designed to determine how clinical trials get structured and executed.
2. Pharmacovigilance: Managing nearly 90% of Novartis’ global drug safety operations. When adverse events get reported anywhere in the world, Hyderabad processes them, assesses risk, and determines regulatory reporting requirements.
3. Biomedical Research: A 200-person unit of scientists and PhDs focusing on early-stage, pre-clinical research and animal studies. This is the earliest phase of drug development, where compounds get identified and tested before human trials.

Status of Logistics Automation

Vanderlande’s customers include major airports, e-commerce companies, and logistics operators who need automated material handling systems. These systems move millions of packages and bags daily, so reliability is critical.

By building the Pune Innovation Centre, Vanderlande’s positioning Indian engineers to solve the hardest technical problems in logistics automation: coordinating thousands of moving parts, preventing failures before they disrupt operations, and optimizing throughput in real-time.

For the logistics and airport sectors, this means innovations in baggage handling, parcel sorting, where warehouse automation will increasingly come from engineers in Pune rather than exclusively from European R&D centers.

Moving Forward

From an industry standpoint, Vanderlande’s Pune Innovation Centre reflects a clear and measurable shift underway across the GCC landscape – from capability concentration to capability ownership. India is no longer viewed primarily as a scale or cost advantage location; it is increasingly becoming a core engineering and innovation base for globally critical, high-complexity domains such as logistics automation, robotics, and integrated hardware-software systems.

For the GCC ecosystem, this development signals three important forward directions:

1. Centers are moving toward end-to-end product ownership, where teams in India design, engineer, and deploy global solutions rather than supporting upstream R&D.
2. Talent strategies are evolving toward deep, cross-disciplinary engineering capabilities that combine AI, software, systems engineering, and domain expertise.
3. Global enterprises are increasingly enabling direct co-creation with customers from their India centers, positioning these hubs closer to business outcomes rather than operational execution.

We see this as part of a broader industry trend where India-based GCCs are becoming integral to global innovation networks – contributing not just through scale and efficiency, but through engineering leadership, product development ownership, and measurable business impact.

Curated by SSF Global to track developments shaping the future of GCCs, enterprise ecosystems, and India’s commercial real estate landscape.

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About SSF Global
SSF Global is a Global Community for Enterprise Function Leaders and serves as a research & advisory platform focused on Global Business Services (GBS), Global Capability Centres (GCCs), and the evolution of enterprise innovation in India and beyond. We track, publish, and partner in narratives that shape how capability centres transform into hubs of trust, intelligence, and sustainable growth. We also evaluate, assess and benchmark the GCCs for their performance, maturity and other parameters using our proprietary tools built from the knowledge gained from direct interaction with our members (GCCs & GBS).