A Storied History in the North
NBMC was established in 1997 by four partners to exclusively manufacture exploration consumables for JKS Boyles in North Bay. In 2001, JKS Boyles was purchased by Atlas Copco; summarily in 2002, on the advice of its major client, North Bay Machining Centre became ISO 9001 certified. Upon a further review of its vendors by Atlas Copco, Glenn Thompson decided to buy out his 3 partners and became the sole owner of NBMC.
In 2005, Thompson recruited his daughter Tammy and her husband Luc Champagne as his successors. In 2008, Mr. Thompson retired to leave the company to his two daughters making North Bay Machining Centre one of the industry’s first women-owned corporations.
In 2008 when the financial crisis hit the manufacturing sector, NBMC was left with very little work as it had become too overly dependent upon the exploration industry. However as exploration began to crawl back in 2010, NBMC promoted Tim Armstrong as its Plant Manager leaving Mr. Champagne with more time to focus on diversifying the company’s client base by concentrating on sales of its machine shop services to a wider industry sector. In a short time, North Bay Machining Centre had expanded its customers beyond Exploration to include the Mining and Construction, Agriculture and Forestry sectors. By landing work across many industries, NBMC commenced automation of its shop operations through the acquisition of a new generation of multi-tasking machines.
In 2014, NBMC became Controlled Goods Certified making them one of the few Northern Ontario companies at the time permitted to work on Defense products.
In 2019, the Covid pandemic hits just as the world’s exploration industry began to ramp up. Lacking trained, experienced machine operators, NBMC invested in a robotic cell to keep up with the high demand of consumables and in 2021, took steps to become Cyber Secure. Achieving this new certification as well as diversifying the industries it serves has helped to ensure that North Bay Machining Centre will be around for another 25 years.
NBMC’s Mission: Our mission is steadfast in providing precision parts, and reliable and on-time delivery. Operating as a full-service machine shop, we source material with your specs and provide designed machining solutions as well as any finishing your parts may require. North Bay Machining Centre is ISO9001-2015 certified, Controlled Goods certified, and now Cyber Secure 2021.
Visit their website to learn more: https://nbmc.ca/
