How Fexco Samoa's 20 remittance branches went from days of downtime to a 4-hour SLA — with ~30% lower costs

“Well done Ricoh Samoa!”

Eneleata Samau, Operations Manager, Fexco Samoa Limited

The situation

Fexco Samoa Limited is a multi-branch remittance and foreign exchange provider — 40 staff, 20 branches across two Samoan islands. 15 branches in Apia on Upolu, another 5 across the Apolima Strait on Savaii. The Samoan diaspora sends home an outsized share of the country’s GDP through counters like these; every remittance branch is a revenue-generating queue that runs on paper receipts, ID printouts and transaction records.

Print isn’t a productivity concern for a business like Fexco. It’s the transaction. A branch with a downed machine isn’t inconvenienced — it’s closed.

The print supply chain underneath the operation wasn’t holding up. The incumbent vendor was missing on three converging pressures at the same time — service reliability, cost, and the calendar. Machines were down for days at a time. Support-request response times measured in “we’ll get to you”. No local field presence to speak of. And the contract was ending.

The challenge

Three things made this materially harder than a single-site print refresh:

1. Twenty branches across two islands. Fifteen in Apia are one thing — you can drive between them. The five on Savaii are on the other side of the Apolima Strait. Ricoh Samoa doesn’t have a field office in Savaii. Every service visit, every consumables refill, every parts swap is a ferry ticket.

2. Remittance downtime is transaction downtime. Every hour a branch counter can’t print a receipt or an ID copy is an hour of transactions that don’t clear. This isn’t a Monday-morning-late-report kind of downtime — it’s revenue.

3. The incumbent’s failure had set the customer’s expectations low, and set our bar to matching them. The previous supplier had been failing for long enough that “reliable service” wasn’t a differentiator on the pitch — it was the ask. We had to demonstrate operational capability across all 20 branches before Fexco would sign on the strength of a promise.

What we did

Phase 1 — Relationship and needs assessment. Ronaldo Mercado, our account executive in Samoa, had a pre-existing relationship with Fexco going in. Multiple meetings across several weeks — not to pitch a fleet, but to understand what Fexco actually needed to keep 20 counters running. Every conversation framed the same way: what saves you money and keeps a queue from stalling. Not “what do we sell that fits.”

Phase 2 — Proposal and stock sourcing. Once the fleet scope was clear — 20 Ricoh IM430 desktop multifunctions, one per branch, plus loan units and consumables covered — Ronaldo worked with our Auckland office to secure the units from Ricoh’s NZ stock. This is where being part of Ricoh South Pacific mattered: a Samoa-only reseller couldn’t have pulled 20 machines from a single warehouse and freighted them together. Contract, freight, customs and local delivery were pre-planned as one sequence rather than 20 separate installs.

Phase 3 — Deployment. All 20 branches deployed inside 2 months from first engagement — Apia branches directly by van, Savaii branches by scheduled ferry crossing. Every install left a working printer, trained counter staff, and the local support number pinned to the machine.

Phase 4 — Ongoing service. Fleet of 33 Ricoh devices — 20 new IM430s plus the pre-existing Ricoh estate absorbed into the same contract — now runs on a single Ricoh Samoa managed agreement. WST 18,000/month rental plus click charges. SLA: 1-hour response, 4-hour resolution, 8-hour case close. One dedicated loan machine ring-fenced against the Fexco fleet so any down device can be physically swapped rather than waiting on parts. Consumables refilled proactively — no run-outs.

Results

• ~30% lower total print cost vs the previous vendor. The number is directional — the incumbent’s real cost was hard to compare cleanly because of unpredictable service fees and downtime — but the like-for-like comparison lands at approximately 30% down.
• Uptime that closes a support case in hours, not days. 1-hour response, 4-hour resolution, 8-hour case close — measured, not aspirational. The previous vendor’s “days” is the number to compare it against.
• 20 Ricoh IM430 desktop MFDs deployed across every Fexco branch on Upolu and Savaii.
• 33 Ricoh devices under one contract, one dedicated loan machine ring-fenced for the fleet.
• 2 months from first engagement to full deployment across two islands.
• Recurring engagement. The contract now runs as an ongoing service relationship, not a one-off installation.
• Named customer reference: Eneleata Samau, Operations Manager, Fexco Samoa Limited — direct feedback: “Well done Ricoh Samoa!”

What made it work

Three decisions, in order of importance:

1. Sold on saving the customer money, not on selling more product. Ronaldo’s engagement pattern with Fexco was consistent from the first meeting to the signed contract — what does this save you, not what does this cost you. In a market where the incumbent had been getting paid for downtime, framing the pitch around avoided cost rather than added capability was the difference. The customer heard it and named it themselves — Ronaldo was described back to us as “always professional and willing to help and save money for the customer”. That phrasing came from Fexco, not from us.

2. NZ stock, treated as one supply chain. Twenty IM430s pulled from Auckland stock, freighted together, cleared through customs together, staged for install together. A local-only reseller doesn’t have this option — they’d be waiting on 20 individual shipping windows. The Ricoh South Pacific structure exists specifically to compress this supply layer: one order from one warehouse, landed in Apia as one delivery, distributed across Upolu and Savaii from a single hub.

3. Post-sale service designed for the actual environment, not the sales pitch. A dedicated loan machine ring-fenced against a 33-device fleet is a real operational commitment — that unit isn’t earning revenue sitting in our warehouse, it’s insurance. Proactive parts replacement — swapping a component before it fails on a counter — is how a 4-hour resolution SLA actually gets hit. Both are the kind of thing that sound easy in a proposal and go quiet after the sales cycle closes. We built them in because Fexco’s branch counters can’t wait.

Cross-strait service on Savaii is the standing exception. Ricoh Samoa doesn’t have a field office there, and no promise on paper changes that. What changes it operationally is planning the ferry crossings into the service schedule — parts and consumables travel with the technician, a spare unit goes on the same trip, and the branch on the other side of the strait doesn’t see a different SLA on paper.

For Ricoh Samoa as a business, this engagement is the local template. It’s the largest single-customer fleet on the island running the post-sale service model — proactive parts, ring-fenced loan machine, cross-strait planning — that we intend to become the local default. Other Samoan multi-branch operators looking at their own print supply chain now have a working example to benchmark against.

Want similar work for your team?

If you’re running a multi-branch operation in the Pacific — remittance, retail, banking, government service delivery — and the print supply chain underneath it is missing on uptime, response time, or predictable cost, get in touch. The first conversation is a discovery one, not a quote one. We’ll walk your branch layout, the actual downtime cost you’re carrying today, and what a Ricoh-managed fleet with a real SLA would change. If it isn’t the right fit, we’ll say so on that first call.