KBC Tools & Machinery: Thirty-five years in Canada and counting

The staff of KBC Tools & Machinery Canada. Photo Credit: KBC Tools & Machinery

The main ingredient of success for big box stores is that it’s all available under one roof, and usually for less money than elsewhere. The many customers of KBC Tools & Machinery can relate to that.

Founded in Detroit in 1965, KBC Tools – or Kabaco Tools, as it was known then – began as a catalogue house selling surplus tools to the metalworking industry at a discount. Since then, the company has grown through acquisition, by opening branch locations, and has become an international supplier of industrial metalworking tools and MRO needs, supplying tooling from more than 600 manufacturers to approximately 20,000 clients. The company has a footprint in both the U.S. and Canada, with its Canadian operation, KBC Tools & Machinery Canada, celebrating its 35^th anniversary this summer, having opened its doors on Aug. 1, 1989, in Mississauga, Ont. – with branches in Oldcastle, Ont., and Delta, B.C., soon following. The company also has American locations in Sterling Heights, Mich.; Elk Grove Village, Ill.; and Fullerton, Calif. KBC Tools supplies cutting tools, indexable tooling, fluids, work holding, abrasives, measuring and inspection equipment, toolroom accessories, hand tools, shop supplies, power and air tools, and machinery from OEMs; and offers its own proprietary branded machinery and tooling lines.

Founded by Karel Bass, the U.S. was KBC Tools’ initial focus, but Canada was always on its – and his – radar. “My father had clients in the Windsor, Ont., area, and he spent a lot of time there on business between the mid-1960s and late-1980s,” said Paula Bass, Karel’s daughter and KBC Tools’ president since 1993, having joined the firm in 1990. The impetus to establish a permanent base in Canada – rather than parachute tools in from across the border – came after the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement was signed in January 1988, with the goal of eliminating all tariffs on trade between the two countries. “Our Canadian customers had been asking us to open a location here for years, and once the trade agreement was in place, my father started thinking, planning, and making it a reality,” Paula Bass said. “If you’re going to do business in a country, you need to develop a direct relationship with your customers there, and we chose to do that by establishing showrooms and stocking warehouses in our Mississauga branch, and then in our other Canadian branches as they opened.”

A DIGITAL WORLD

When KBC Tools first came to Canada, Paula Bass said, it was the first company in the industry to have a priced catalogue, which at the time was a new method for pricing and selling tools in this country. “We’ve always been primarily a catalogue house, but we’ve now moved into being a digital catalogue house,” she explained. “We launched our first E-commerce site in 2000, and it’s become very strong.” And the company also operates a specifically Canadian website. “The website makes it easy for buying tools afterhours, or for those not near a Canadian branch to order their tooling because they know direct sales support is just a phone call or email away,” she said. The company also offers its own mobile-friendly app for ordering. “The app allows barcode readings from any of the 100,000 products purchased from us for convenient ordering and reordering,” said company vice president David Zagar. “We developed it with a partner, and it’s available from the App Store and Google Play.”

The KBC Tools app. Photo Credit: KBC Tools & Machinery

Not all the company’s business is done online, however. “Some clients often travel from great distances to visit one of our branches in-person, to see the equipment and talk with our team – especially after the pandemic, we find that a lot of customers value that contact,” Paula Bass said. “Clients can opt to pick up their goods in the 24/7 lockers in Mississauga or have orders shipped directly to their facilities from KBC locations.”

CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

KBC Tools has huge inventories of stock in all its branches and central distribution centres and has been around long enough to have learned the right ways for managing it. “A good inventory system starts with good housekeeping,” Paula Bass said. “Everything should be clearly labelled and identified with precise bar coding, and in a specific location; and storage should be centralized in the most economical way to manage inventory and allow for inspection, repair, and reordering.” She also cites some lessons learned during the pandemic, during which KBC Tools remained open as an essential business. “The pandemic exposed bad habits in the supply chain environment – poor planning, inefficiencies, and more – that had been covered by deep inventories and short delivery cycles,” she said. “For us, it reinforced the fact that buying in advance and securing pricing and inventory early are keys to escaping supply chain issues. And it’s also prudent to develop an alternative product list ahead of time, avoiding the panic related to long delivery times for first-choice items.”

And the inventory stocked by KBC Tools has definitely changed over the years, as technology itself has changed. “For example, we started off in 1965 selling custom vernier calipers, but don’t sell many of those anymore – instead, we sell a large number of digital calipers from a range of OEMs,” David Zagar said. “Overall, we have a nice blend of tried-and-true products – for a young worker just getting into machining, or a hobbyist, we have all the basic tools to get them started. At the other end, we have the latest cutting-edge tooling and equipment for the most demanding of world class manufacturers and experienced pros. For some tooling machinery and equipment, there’s a real difference between the quality and depth of selection of what’s available in big box stores and what you can get at an industrial stocking MRO supplier like us.”

KBC Tools is also a WBE-certified company in Canada and a WBENC-certified company in the U.S. – in other words, at least 51 per cent owned, managed, and controlled by women – in accordance with Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) guidelines. “We obtained this certification in 2016,” Paula Bass said. “More and more buyers needed that validation from us to be included in their Tier 1 and Tier 2 diversity spends, especially customers in the automotive industry.”

As it celebrates 35 years in Canada – and closes in on 60 years in business overall – KBC Tools sees big opportunities ahead. “There are so many synergies today for global companies to be able to buy across their locations and negotiate pricing based on their total spend rather than on one location – to harmonize their buying with us, so we can pass benefits on to all of the locations,” Paula Bass said. “Our goal is to keep growing our national account business while also supporting our traditional client base.”