Indonesian tech start-up Transporta is rolling out a transport management system to help trucking companies navigate Indonesia’s ecommerce boom. This comes as outdated logistics technology is proving difficult for companies that want to scale up.

Indonesia’s ecommerce market grew 54% year-on-year, reaching $32bn in 2020. Last year’s boom was accelerated by rapid digitalisation of services brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing norms.

“Growing ecommerce sectors are driving up the demand for ecommerce logistics,” said Emma Hartono, COO of Transporta. “However, technologies to run logistics companies are falling behind. Indonesia’s truckers face limited to no visibility on their operations, be it orders, performance, utilities or finance. They also deal with poor internal communications and scattered data sources.”

Transporta’s transport management system provides trucking companies and enterprises with a bird’s eye-view of their operations through a centralised cloud platform. As a result, truckers can increase the speed of their daily operations and use resources such as routes, truck space, petrol usage and driver cohorts efficiently, driving profitability and delivery performance.

“Transport management systems have proved to be able to reduce logistics costs with a majority of freight savings coming from better routing and negotiations,” said Hartono. “In Indonesia, where logistics costs are among the highest in Asean at 30% of GDP, savings are expected to be even larger.”

There are an estimated 100,000 trucking companies in Indonesia, controlling some five million lorries. However, over 75% of Indonesia’s trucking companies have less than 20 lorries, resulting in empty hauls and routing inefficiencies. At the same time, these SME truckers do not have the financial heft to use online platforms, further exacerbating the gap between large and SME truckers.

With Transporta’s cloud-based offering, transport management systems are no longer out of budget for SME truckers, allowing them to compete for a larger bite of an ever-expanding pie. Transporta enables quick and easy onboarding with a self-onboarding process. Truckers can build quotes, orders and invoices, while managing inventories and assets via smart fleet management, automatic order tracking, and an integrated CRM all in one place.

“We are targeting to onboard 10,000 trucking companies onto Transporta over the next three years,” said Hartono. “Currently, we are entering potential partnerships to around 1900 truckers via the Indonesia Truck Association (Aptrindo). We are also leveraging partnerships with internet of things start-up Lacak.io to further optimise our services and help SME truckers with a centralised cloud.”