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THUNDER BAY BUSINESS JUNE 2012
Thunder Bay’s Bombardier Plant Experiences Growth! Continued From Previous Page “ We have a talented group of people here in Thunder Bay, especially in terms of manufacturing product. The tooling plays a vital role in our business. We have tool designers and makers that are the cream of the crop with 20 to 30 years experience. We are fortunate to have some employees like that here. Today we are hiring new people as well that bring new talent and skills that are often more in the virtual and electronic world. We work very closely with Lakehead University to hire students and work on R & D from the Faculty of Engineering. We see a lot of connections between our two organizations. We are also very strongly connected with Confederation College to provide us with a lot of the talents we need to check and test our products, what we call methods or industrial engineering. We are using a lot of talent right now. We have jobs for all the welders they have graduating right now at Confederation College. We decide what the recipe is for the cake we are going to have and these people decide how we are going to make the cake,” smiles Rene.
“ This is a world class plant. When we compare ourselves we compare to the rest of the world, to our competitors and the other 40 plants Bombardier has in the world. We have a Bombardier system measure that is an objective measure of where we stack up in terms of the other plants so that is one way to measure ourselves. We compete with other international firms such as Siemens and also benchmark against them,” noted Lalande. “ We are doing well right now, working on all the mass transit that is happening in Ontario right now. We think we do it well and our customers are happy with what we are doing. We do respect the customer and our jobs are only made possible because we satisfy the needs of our customer. This is very much at the heart of our business.” Bombardier Thunder Bay has made many
investments in the last 2 years in term of tooling and equipment and are now putting together that new line for the light rail vehicle as well as the test track that is required to test the product because they always test each vehicle at Bombardier. They are also investing in the next generation of Bi Level, spending over $20 million. That product should start production in the middle of 2013. When Bombardier finish the current bi-level production they will have made over 1100 units in the last 30 years and certainly hope this new generation version will be as successful in the long term. “ We may not be at 1300 or 1400 employees here in Thunder Bay for ever as there will be fluctuations. This year and next year will be excellent years for us and after that we have to find additional contracts. The beauty of that is we now have two strong platforms that will prevent us from going flat or to 500 employees. We are healthy, at a peak and want to stay as close as possible to this peak. Comparing ourselves to a construction company right know we are building three skyscrapers at once. Two of them will repeat but one is the subway cars for Toronto that once we finish is over and there may only be a requirements for a few more units.,” said Lalande. “ I love Thunder Bay but I ‘ll be honest, I spend the vast majority of my time working. I come to work at 7am and leave at 7or 8pm each day. I do love my job and what I am doing and think it is important to deliver these products well to the customer. We have challenges as you could imagine. Not all these projects are easy to make but I feel I owe it to my people to work these hours and solve problems. It is a little bit more than just a job,” notes Lalande. “ I do like the outdoors and absence of traffic in Thunder Bay compared to Montreal and Toronto. There are all the services that you need so it is a very good balance between nature and freedom. Services like restaurants and boutiques
Top: The Bi Level has been a mainstay for Bombardier Thunder Bay The Thunder Bay plant is over 500,000 square feet in size! provide everything you need to enjoy yourself except time. The sun is up until 10 pm in the evening which is good for a guy like me who comes home late.” Bombardier Thunder Bay is undergoing a lot of growth which is very nice but also full of challenges at the same time noted Rene Lalande. “There are a lot of people here not used to introducing 600 people into our culture and training them on how we do things, never mind their specific
job. Our growth is faster that we thought so we have imported some managers from the outside including Austria, Mexico, France, Quebec and from here in Thunder Bay. We are all working together to make this plant grow and are trying to make this Thunder Bay plant succeed.” smiles Rene Lalande.