office machines

PNG man markets office machines

A significant new enterprise owned by Papua New Gui nean nationals has made its bow in Port Moresby Na tion-wide Office and Business Machine Consultants.

Executive director of the company is Mr John Jaintong, 28, of Lae, in the Morobe Pro vince. Mr Jaintong has several years experience in marketing and administration in the of fice and business machines in dustry.

The company will retail Swiss and Swedish equipment (Hermes and Facit electric and manual typewriters, and other items), as well as Ameri can and Japanese photo copiers, offset printing machines, electronic and electro-mechanical cash registers and calculators.

New Zealander Mr William Vassilieff, who has 25 years’ experience in the industry, will be general manager and technical consultant to the company. His special task will

be to design and co-ordinate training programmes for the company’s technical employees. The firm already employs 10 national trainee

servicemen, who are expected to do training on the job and abroad with the manufac turers. The company hopes to increase staff to 50 by June, 1978.

Mr Jaintong said it was the first time nationals had become involved in this kind of business.

He shares the hope of other nationally-owned firms that the central government will “decentralise” spending by in creasingly patronising ser vices provided by them. • Western Samoa is to set up a computer centre to cater for the needs of government

departments and private cor

porations. Government

departments at present have their computer processing done in Fiji or American Samoa. Mr Barry Davies, a NZ computer consultant, is in charge of the project. He will recruit staff, find a suitable place for the centre, and ad vise on the building required.

The computers will be sup plied by Burroughs Ltd, of NZ.

Continued on page 87.

• Mr Jaintong is pictured (standing) with Mr Vassilieff.

Taking The Sour Taste Out Of

The Customer’S Mouth

“Papua New Guinea has been used by other countries’ ‘briefcase salesmen’ as a venue for making the fast and easy sale ... This has contributed to all different types of office and

business machines flooding the

country without honest con

sideration of ‘service back-up

and spare parts’.

“It is a major factor con tributing to the present nerve cracking dilemma of unavailability of spare parts

and high service fees.”

The words of PNG’s office

equipment heavy, John Jain

tong could apply to Fiji, the

Solomons, New Hebrides, Norfolk Island or any other

Islands territory equally as

well.

Fact is, efforts in recent years

of non-islanders trying to flog

most every conceivable piece

of office equipment without

any thought of support or parts for hapless users, has left a sour taste in the mouth of many.

It is not surprising, then, that

many key office administrators

in the Islands are sceptical of much of the newer type of sys tems and opt to stay with the “evil we know”.

Thus, these people are stay ing with what is often out moded equipment, such as

electro-mechanical accounting

machines and manual type writers, etc., rather than plunge into the unknown and ques tionable expertise of many

office equipment suppliers to

support what they sell these

days.

Support and availability of

parts is really what office equipment is all about, par ticularly in regions such as the Islands where machine exper tise is not exactly plentiful.

It is thus somewhat re assuring to see entrepreneurs such as Mr Jaintong, and others like John Scott, at Remington, and the formidable PNG Print ing effort out of Port Moresby, invest heavily in this area.

Whereas the trend in office equipment supply in the South Seas is for increasing local con

trol of distributorships, moves are also well underway for very serious training indeed of Islanders in servicing a wide range of office equipment.

At Mr Jaintong’s Nation wide Office and Business Ma chines Consultants, for example, the emphasis is very much on service, directed by senior executives such as tech nical consultant. Bill Vass.

The Vass team includes Albert Madek, Sarufa Mari, Moroba Buari, Jonah Eliap and Sam Ezekiel.

At competitor, PNG Print

ing, important alliances are

consummated and well established with overseas majors, such as Olivetti, where

Sydney-based distributor

superviser Jack Mole is in volved.

This company has invested condsiderably in service train ing for its support staff. Its in volvement with equipment, particularly from Olivetti, is wide.

Equipment can range from manual and portable type writers, through electric

typewriters and simple elec

tronic accounting machines, to

sophisticated banking ter

minals, word processors, office minicomputers and data com munications concentrators.

Other major names which come to mind in PNG and indeed Fiji and several other countries in the region include Burroughs, NCR, 3M, Oza paper, Brownbuilt, Arnos, Bell & Howell and New Zealand’s

übiquitous Rotascan filing sys

tem.

Ozapaper, currently set to

merge with the Oce-Crosby Group in Australia, is a big name in copiers, microfilm and

the engineering drawing area.

Bell & Howell, through Syd ney heavy Ron Webb, has an active network of distributors in towns such as Apia, Honiara, Port Moresby, Suva, etc., and is heavily into audio-visual

equipment, particularly projec

tors, and micrographics.

Two Australian magazines,

incidentally, keep users and

suppliers well in touch with latest applications and pro ducts. They are “Micro graphics Australasia”, Box 414, PO Artarmon, NSW, 2064, and “Modern Office”, Box 3337, GPO, Sydney, NSW, 2001.

American Group, 3M, now has a staff office in Port Moresby, and competes with Bell & Howell in micro graphics, but also supplies a much wider range of supplies, such as copiers, tapes, etc.

Arnos, based in Melbourne, is an active filing systems maker which is vigorously exporting to several countries.

NCR, with major offices in Port Moresby and Suva, has also a most active operation out of Noumea, of an agency basis covering New Caledonia and the New Hebrides.

IBM remains a key supplier of office equipment in most countries, and of larger, mainframe computers in New Caledonia and Tahiti. Bur roughs has secured computer sales in Fiji and the Japanese have their first computer mainframe in the Islands, within the Computing for Commerce-associated bureau in Port Moresby, involved with New Guinea Motors.

Here involved is a low-end $ 100,000-range Facom 230/15 system.

In PNG, British supplier ICL remains in control of the local computer mainframe

market, with a bevy of instal lations virtually controlling the entire market for this class of machine.

A plethora of far bigger com puter number-crunchers are in use on US military sites in Micronesia, such as at

Kwajalein, Saipan and Guam,

and the French have some big machines in French Polynesia, involved with recently revived H-bomb testing, but unsur prisingly, little details are avail able on these!

Nationwide Office, of Port

Moresby, recently ordered

some 10 SC 8000 cartridge

electric typewriters from Syd

ney’s President Office Ma chines, a move seen as a pointer to an already wide range of products it is involved with.

Here, Nationwide’s agencies are not unusual for an organis ation which has invested

heavily on support throughout

the Islands’ largest land mass.

Other Nationwide agencies include Hermes 808 golfball electric typewriters, Facit 1601

portable typewriters, A. B.

Dick copiers, duplicators, off

set printers and A. B. Dick Magna I word processors.

Nationwide is also heavily into the electronic cash register region, with agreements with

Hugin, Citizen, Sanyo and

Casio.

The company sells itself strongly on its local control and its investment in local staff.