This piece is written for the procurement lead, finance director or office manager evaluating printer suppliers in any Pacific market. The five questions below are deliberately vendor-neutral. Whichever supplier you are evaluating — Ricoh, Kyocera, Toshiba, Brother, or any other brand — these questions surface the same gaps in their proposal.
We use these questions ourselves when we evaluate suppliers we work with. The right answers do not have a single right vendor — they have a clear pattern of substantiated answers versus generalisations. The five questions are designed to make the difference visible.
Question 1: What is the all-in monthly cost over sixty months, including everything?
Every quote you receive will include a device price and a per-page rate. Some will bundle service, some will not. Some will include consumables, some will not. Comparing them directly on the visible numbers is almost always misleading.
Ask each supplier to provide a single all-in monthly cost over a sixty-month contract, with every cost line included:
- Device acquisition or lease
- Toner, drums and developer consumables
- Service kits and scheduled part replacements
- Labour for both preventive and break-fix visits
- Freight on parts and consumables into your specific market
- Fleet management software and reporting
- Secure-print release, scan routing and any other software inclusions
- End-of-contract data sanitisation and disposal
Then ask them to confirm in writing what is not included — what triggers an additional invoice over the life of the contract. Common exclusions include emergency-overnight freight, after-hours service callouts, mid-contract upgrades, and damage caused by power events or environmental conditions.
A supplier who can quote a single all-in monthly figure with a short, specific exclusions list is selling you a comparable product. A supplier who can only quote a device price and a per-page rate, with everything else “as needed”, is leaving the rest of the cost as your unmanaged exposure.
Question 2: Show me your service performance data for the last twelve months in my specific market
This is the question that separates serious suppliers from marketing operations.
Any vendor with genuine operational depth in your market measures their own service. They know their mean time to resolution. They know their first-time-fix rate. They know how many tickets they closed within their committed SLA versus how many breached. They know which devices in their installed base are responsible for the most service hours.
Ask each supplier to provide:
- Mean time from fault report to fully working device, over the last twelve months, in your specific market
- Percentage of service tickets resolved within the committed SLA
- First-time-fix rate (the percentage of visits where the technician arrived with the right part and the device was working when they left)
- Average device uptime across their installed base in your market
Suppliers with the data answer in numbers. Suppliers without the data answer in adjectives — “industry-leading”, “best in class”, “rapid response”. Adjectives mean the data either does not exist or does not look good.
Notice that this question does not ask the supplier to commit to a future performance number. It asks them to prove a past one. Future commitments without past performance are sales pitches; past performance is evidence.
Question 3: What’s in your parts and consumables inventory in my country right now?
A vendor with genuine in-country support holds physical inventory in your market. The inventory is finite and concrete. They can list it for you.
Ask each supplier to provide:
- The list of spare parts currently held in physical stock in your country for the device range being proposed
- The list of toner and consumables held locally, with the typical replenishment lead time from regional warehouse
- The proportion of common failure-pattern parts (fusers, paper-feed components, scanner mechanisms) that are routinely held locally versus shipped on demand from offshore
The right answer is a list of specific items. The wrong answer is a description of regional warehousing capability without any local commitment. A regional warehouse in Auckland or Sydney is useful — international freight from there is faster than from the manufacturer — but it is not the same product as a local warehouse in your market. The vendor with both is selling something materially different from the vendor with only one.
If a vendor cannot tell you what is in their local warehouse, it is reasonable to assume that little is.
Question 4: What happens to my service if my account manager leaves?
Continuity of relationship is the silent multiplier in printer-fleet service quality. The customers who report the best service over multi-year relationships are almost always the ones whose primary contact at the supplier has not changed.
Conversely: a vendor whose account manager turnover is high will reset your service relationship every six to twelve months. Each new account manager has to learn your site, your configurations, your historical issues and your operational quirks. Each handover loses some of the institutional knowledge that made the previous relationship work. After three account-manager changes in five years, the relationship is effectively new again — but the contract is the same age, and the patience is thinner.
Ask each supplier:
- Who will be the named account manager for this contract?
- How long has that person been in their current role?
- What is the supplier’s typical account-manager tenure across their book of business?
- What is the documented handover procedure when an account manager leaves?
A supplier who can answer all four concretely is selling a relationship that will still exist in three years. A supplier who cannot is selling a contract that will outlive its current relationship.
Question 5: What is the end-of-contract path — renewal, exit, and data sanitisation?
The last question on procurement checklists is usually the one that has the biggest commercial impact, and it is usually asked too late. The end of a contract is where the next vendor’s pricing power, the data on the device, and the migration cost all collide.
Ask each supplier to commit, in writing, to:
- The notice period required for non-renewal at end of contract
- The procedure for transitioning to another supplier if you choose to switch — what handover materials are provided, what configuration data is shared, what continues to operate during the gap
- The certified data-sanitisation procedure for devices being decommissioned, including evidence (certificate of destruction, not just verbal assurance)
- The environmentally responsible disposal commitment for devices at end of life
- The mid-contract escape clauses if the supplier’s service performance falls below the committed SLA
A vendor who is confident in their service does not fear these questions. A vendor whose model depends on customer inertia does. The difference is visible in how directly each one answers.
What to do with the answers
When you have responses from each shortlisted supplier across all five questions, lay them out side by side in a single document. Three patterns will emerge.
Some suppliers will answer every question concretely, with specific numbers, names, lists and procedures. Those suppliers are selling you an operational relationship — they have the data because they run the operation that produces it.
Other suppliers will answer some questions concretely and others in generalisations. Where the generalisations sit reveals where the operational gaps are. A supplier with strong service performance but vague pricing structure is hiding cost exposure. A supplier with clear pricing but vague service performance is selling you the contract more than the relationship.
A small group will answer almost everything in generalisations. Those suppliers are selling a sales pitch. The contract may still get signed because their device price is lowest — but the eventual operational cost will land on you, not them, because the commitments they refused to make in writing remain unmade in practice.
The procurement decision is then yours, with eyes open. The cheapest sticker price is rarely the cheapest relationship; the most expensive sticker price is rarely the most expensive either. The right answer is the supplier whose evidence holds up under all five questions and whose pricing reflects the operational depth they can prove.
If you would like our answers to all five questions against your specific market, we can have a written response back to you within two business days. Get in touch and we will treat the request the same way we would expect any supplier we evaluated to treat ours.