Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, boasts what is said to be West Africa’s largest market in Kejetia. The most successful female marketer in each major product is designated the queen of that market segment. Thus one can find a ‘shoe queen’ or a ‘soap queen’. If Kumasi’s many engineering contractors were to adopt the same practice, Solomon Adjorlolo would no doubt be elected king of that domain.
Solomon Adjorlolo was a technical engineer in the physics department at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, but his ambition was to start his own business. He started in 1971 making basic physics instruments to sell to high schools. With the help of Dr. Frank Lukey, an English physics professor, Solomon started his own business in Dr. Lukey’s garage on the KNUST campus. As the business expanded and some basic woodworking machines were acquired, Solomon decided to look for a workshop in Anloga, a suburb of Kumasi with a large community of carpenters and where he had family connections.
Wood was not the only material used in Solomon’s early work, but it featured in most of his products. He branched out to produce more wood products, such as elementary school teaching aids, drawing boards, and square tees. Initially, the customers buying these products were private, church-run schools that paid their bills on time, but to further expand the business, Solomon was forced to seek orders from state schools. When he was told to collect the payment from the Ministry of Education, the money arrived very late or not at all. He decided that the business could not continue like this and he had to explore new markets.
That’s when Solomon contacted the university’s Technology Consulting Center (TCC). TCC was demonstrating metal machining and construction of welded steel plants and offering training and access to machine tools, so Solomon decided to go into metal fabrication. Through this program, in 1979, he stocked up on machine tools: lathes, a milling machine, welders, and sawmills. Solomon decided to formally register his company and changed its name to SIS Engineering Ltd.
Surrounded by hundreds of carpentry shops, the new company was sometimes called upon to carry out repairs on imported bench saws, planers and wood lathes. Solomon noted that only a few of the larger shops could afford these imported machines and that there was a large market on his doorstep for affordable, locally produced machines. He started making bench saws and wood lathes and found that building machines was much more profitable than any of his previous ventures.
After a few years, nearly every shop on Carpenters’ Row, Analoga, had an SIS bench saw and several shops were operating four or more SIS wood lathes making thousands of furniture legs and the popular double-ended mortar called ‘ata’ (double). Not just in Kumasi, but across the country, SIS machines were gaining a reputation for durability and efficient after-sales service. In addition to the lower cost, the ability to supply spare parts and repairs at short notice proved to be a major advantage in competition with imported equipment.
By the mid-1980s, SIS produced much more than woodworking machines. The post-harvest and food processing industry was a great potential market for affordable, locally produced machines. SIS produced a range of machines for milling maize, processing cassava, and extracting palm oil and shea butter. As work progressed, the machines grew to industrial scale, with multi-tonne-per-day feed mills for large poultry farms, vegetable oil mills, and steam distillation plants producing perfume from citronella and lemongrass. lemon.
Although Solomon was now producing plants for fairly large companies, he never lost his concern for helping small-scale informal sector industries. Helping traditional women’s groups produce staple foods was always one of her priorities. For example, the popular food product ‘gari’ was made from cassava by groups of women using simple hand tools and charcoal stoves. When asked to produce a mechanical plant for a male entrepreneur, he was concerned that women might be put out of business. She consulted with the TCC and, in collaboration with the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD), she alerted aid agencies to the danger and provided the new technology to many of the women’s groups.
In the late 1980s, many of the orders for food processing equipment came directly to SIS Engineering from development agencies promoting rural and women’s industries. He no longer needed the TCC as an intermediary. Solomon was helping the TCC more than the TCC was helping the SIS. He was involved in developing new machines, training apprentices, and helping to deliver workshops, seminars, and short courses held at the university. However, being a leading member of TCC’s Customer Association, Solomon Adjorlolo always maintained that without TCC’s advice to switch to metal fabrication and supply of machine tools on easy payment terms, none of his success would have happened. been possible.
