Author: Nathan Hall

Today we visited the German location for Gentex. Many of us are familiar with Gentex because of it’s large presence in West Michigan due to it’s Zeeland plant. While the Zeeland plant is where all their manufacturing is done, the plant in Germany is used mainly for distribution and outputs 300,000 mirrors a week.

The people at Gentex were kind enough to give us a tour of their facilities, provide us with great snacks, and inform us on their business operations. The company understands that car mirrors may become obsolete in the future so they have positioned themselves in other areas of the car industry. This includes becoming industry leaders in electronically dimming windows. They are constantly pushing the boundaries of what their mirror technology can do and working to integrate their products into more vehicles.

Today we visited the Burke Porter Group in Brugge, Belgium. This company was founded in Grand Rapids, MI more than 60 years ago as a manufacturer of large machines. Today, the Burke Porter Group has aquired lots of different types of companies in an effort to diversify their buisiness.

The building we toured deals specifically with making large machines for “end of line” testing for cars. These machines test things like braking system and autonomous driving systems for major car companies.

Upon our visit, we were first given an extensive summary of how the buisiness has evolved over the years and details of the many different end of line testing systems that were made in the facilities. Then, we were taken for a tour of the facilities to get a more hands-on idea of the production of these machines. It was very interesting to see how they create the same testing machines in slightly different variations in order to satisfy different customer needs.

Burke Porter is a solid company that has worked extensively to diversify in order to succeed. They push the boundaries in various fields and have profited greatly from a hard working mentality. It was a pleasure touring their facilities and learning from them.

Today we took a canal tour throughout Amsterdam. We learned about the history of the canals, the houses along them, and the expansion of the city. The city has created new canals expanding from the center to allow for development. Many of them used to be heavily traveled for commerce. House boats also litter the waterways. These homes are surprisingly nice and apparently the real estate on the water is high demand.

The tour took us out of the canals into a body of water called the IJ, meaning water in Dutch. It used to be part of the sea but is now separated thanks to barriers.