Kumasi, Ghana’s second 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 adopted the same practice, Solomon Adjorlolo would certainly 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 out 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 business in Dr. Lukey’s garage on the KNUST campus. As the business expanded and some basic woodworking machines were purchased, 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 did appear 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 who bought these products were church-run private schools that paid their bills on time, but to further expand the business, Solomon was forced to seek orders from public schools. When he was told to collect the payment from the Ministry of Education, the money arrived too late or did not arrive at all. He decided that the business could not continue like this and he had to explore new markets.
It was then that Solomon contacted the university’s Technology Consulting Center (TCC). The TCC was demonstrating metal machining and welded steel plant construction 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 make 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 locally produced machines sold at affordable prices. He started making bench saws and wood lathes and found that building machines was far more profitable than any of his previous ventures.
After a few years almost every shop in Carpenters’ Row, Analogue, 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 possibility of supplying spare parts and repairs at short notice proved to be a great advantage in the competition with imported equipment.
In the mid-1980s, SIS produced much more than woodworking machines. The postharvest and food processing industry was a large potential market for affordable, locally produced machines. SIS produced a range of machines for grinding corn, processing cassava, and extracting palm oil and shea butter. As the work progressed, the machines grew to industrial scale, with multi-ton per day feed mills for large poultry farms, vegetable oil mills, and steam distillation plants producing perfume from citronella and grass. lemon.
Although Solomon was now producing plants for quite large companies, he never lost his concern with helping small-scale informal sector industries. Helping traditional women’s groups to produce staple foods was always one of her priorities. For example, the popular food product ‘gari’ was made from manioc by women’s groups 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 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 run workshops, seminars and short courses held at the university. However, being a leading member of TCC’s Customers Association, Solomon Adjorlolo always maintained that without TCC’s advice to switch to metal fabrication and easy-pay machine tool supply, none of his success would have been possible. been possible.