“World class service. It works any and every time.”
Samson Ragaruma, Sales & Service Engineer, Ricoh Solomons — on the SLA model in market.
The situation
Solomon Water is the government-owned water utility serving the Solomon Islands — 30 to 35 staff running operations from four Honiara offices (BJS Building, Blue House Mataniko, Brick House, Panatina Plaza) and four outer-island sites: Tulagi, Auki, Noro and Gizo. The outer islands are not a logistics afterthought. They are the operation. Tulagi is accessible only by outboard motor boat, and bad weather can cut off delivery and service completely. Noro requires a flight to Munda and a truck across. Some sites have three staff. Others need an A3 MFD with full colour to run their day.
The print fleet underneath that operation in 2014 was a problem in three directions at once. Three different vendors — Toshiba, HP, Kyocera devices spread across the sites — meaning three supply chains, three service relationships and three different sets of consumables to keep moving. None of the previous vendors kept qualified technicians on the ground in the Solomons. None kept spare parts in-country. Response times measured in days when measured at all. Outer-island sites received no service of any kind. A printer in Gizo with a paper-feed fault was a printer that stayed broken.
Cost was a problem. The bigger problem was that the utility could not run a multi-island operation on a print fleet that worked only in Honiara, and not reliably there.
The challenge
Three things made this engagement materially harder than a single-site print deal:
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Right-sizing across very different site profiles. Some sites have three staff and need a single small MFD. Others need an A3 MFD with full colour to handle the volume. The same vendor needed to deliver across both extremes without over-spec’ing the small sites or bottlenecking the large ones.
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Outer-island logistics, every site. Noro means flying to Munda then trucking across. Tulagi means outboard motor boat — weather-dependent and occasionally impassable. Auki and Gizo have their own freight cycles. A toner cartridge ordered on Tuesday in Honiara does not arrive in Tulagi on Wednesday. The supply model had to work around that, not pretend it away.
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Weather dependency for Tulagi. OBM-only access means a fault during bad weather is a fault that stays unfixed until the sea calms down. The only mitigation that works is keeping spare parts and consumables close to the site, not in a warehouse two islands away.
What we did
Phase 1 — Honiara rollout (2014–2017/19). Twelve assets placed across the four Honiara sites, all on SLA agreements with a 1-hour response, 4-hour resolution and 8-hour case-close target. Same-day toner delivery within Honiara. The internal champion at Solomon Water — Buka in Procurement — recommended expansion after the initial rollout proved out. The entry point had been Maddy in IT and Buka in Procurement, both of whom already knew the RSP CEO. That existing relationship opened the 2014 conversation; the SLA performance opened the next phase.
Phase 2 — Outer-island expansion (staged). Tulagi, Auki, Noro and Gizo brought on one by one rather than as a single rollout. Each site was scoped against its own access pattern — air, road, outboard motor boat — and its own staff count. Larger sites consolidated four competitor machines onto one higher-PPM A3 MFD. Smaller sites got the device they actually needed, not the device the previous vendor had landed there.
Phase 3 — Print control and consumables (ongoing). PaperCut deployed across the fleet for print control, monitoring and waste reduction. A4 paper supply added inside the same managed relationship — full ownership of the print environment rather than handing the customer back a list of things they still had to source separately.
Coordination ran in-country. Samson Ragaruma led the engagement on the ground. Ricoh Solomons’ 18-year experienced senior technician is the operational backbone of the service relationship. When he took leave during the recent service period, Ricoh proactively flew in cover from Ricoh Vanuatu rather than letting the SLA slip. That is not a contract clause. It is what a single-vendor relationship buys you when the vendor takes the SLA seriously.
Results
- 4:1 device consolidation at larger sites — four competitor machines replaced by one Ricoh A3 MFD per site
- 1-hour response, 4-hour resolution, 8-hour case-close SLA, sustained in Honiara
- Same-day toner delivery in Honiara; next-available-route dispatch to outer islands, immediate
- Three vendors collapsed to one — Solomon Water now runs a single-supplier print fleet
- Print waste reduced via PaperCut deployment (specific figures not captured)
- Cross-market cover during local technician leave — Ricoh Vanuatu engineer flown in to maintain service continuity
- 10+ year recurring relationship, from 2014 to present, across every site and every staged expansion
What made it work
Three decisions, in order of importance:
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Standardising on one vendor was the foundational call. Solomon Water’s move from three fragmented vendors to a single Ricoh standard is the decision that made every subsequent gain possible. One supply chain. One service relationship. One set of consumables to keep moving across seven sites and four islands. Without that decision, no SLA written by anyone would have held across the operation.
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A simple commercial model removes barriers to expansion. Low monthly rental with a 20-day account for usage charges. No surprise toner bills. No procurement gymnastics each time a new site comes online. That structure is what let the outer-island sites get added one at a time as the relationship proved out, rather than waiting for a full-fleet tender that would never have happened.
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Owning the whole print environment, including paper and consumables. Most vendors stop at the device and let the customer chase paper and toner separately. Including A4 supply inside the managed relationship closed the last gap. Solomon Water does not need to know which staff member is running low on toner at which site, because the supply runs without their involvement.
For Ricoh Solomons as a business, this engagement is the clearest proof point we have of what local technical capability buys you in a market where the cheapest device with the worst service relationship is always available. The 18-year experienced technician on the ground is the difference. Flying in cover from Ricoh Vanuatu when he took leave is the difference. Same-day toner delivery in Honiara is the difference. Other Solomon Islands government and commercial operators running multi-site print operations now have an in-country single-vendor relationship available that does not exist anywhere else in the market.
Want similar work for your team?
If you are running a multi-site print operation in the Solomon Islands — or in any Pacific market where vendor responsiveness collapses the moment you leave the capital — get in touch. The first conversation is a discovery one, not a quote one. We will walk the sites, the access patterns and the realistic service expectations against the operating reality of the market. If the answer is “the kit you have is fine, you just need a different service relationship”, we will say so.