Today marked the day of visiting the small Dutch town of Zaanse Shans. Our purpose of this trip was to visit the windmill factories and learn about the engineering behind Dutch cultural industries such as shoes, cheese, and biscuit. When we arrived at the mills our tour guide Filipe explained to us the commission system that many Dutch companies implement. The system is that tour guides and customer services representatives around the Netherlands are incentivized to get tourists and locals to purchase items and partake in activities by offering them commission on the sale that the products make. Specifically at the windmills in Zaanse Shans the museums and exhibits and large giftshops filled with Dutch clothing and foods especially cheeses. The Dutch have a system in place that keeps track of which costumer saw a specific employee and tracks their payments for the employee’s commission. This is very different than many American business models because typically in America any sale or profit that a company will receive is evenly split between each employee. This struck me as extremely interesting on the tour because of how different the Dutch approach to this business model was than what I am used to in America.

The other extremely interesting part of the visit today were the many engineering designs of the machines making chocolate, shoes, and cheese. I was specifically fascinated by the designs that produced the shoes. The drill machines would mimic the motion of an already designed shoe by creating a stop contraption attached to the drill. This allowed the Dutch to start mass producing these shoes by cutting the design time from several hours to a matter of minutes. They also had extremely useful product designs in the cheese and biscuits. They had many different container designs for aging in the cheese making process. Their storage containers had specific sized holes that allowed the moisture and liquid to drain from the cheese itself. They also had creative designs on how to separate the curd and the liquid while mixing in larger volume solutions. Finally their biscuit making process showed fine older engineering that allowed them to mass produce biscuits as well. The Dutch developed a large pressing and heating conveyer belt system that took straight dough and created biscuits within minutes. This allows them to become suppliers of those specific products. This concept was easy for me to grasp because of older American production systems having many similar machines.