Transporta, an Indonesian tech startup, is rolling out a transport management system to help trucking companies navigate Indonesia's e-commerce boom. This comes as the outdated logistics technology is posing a challenge to companies that want to scale up.

Indonesia's e-commerce market grew 54% year-on-year, reaching US$32 billion in 2020. Last year's boom was accelerated by rapid digitalization of services brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing norms.

Emma Hartono, COO of Transporta, said, "Growing e-commerce sectors are driving up the demand for e-commerce logistics. 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 is offering a solution to these problems. The tech startup's transport management system provides trucking companies and enterprises a bird's eye-view of their operations through a centralized cloud platform. As a result, truckers can maximize the speed of their daily operations and utilize resources such as routes, truck space, petrol usage, and driver cohorts efficiently, driving both 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. In Indonesia, where logistics costs are among the highest in ASEAN at 30% of GDP, savings are expected to be even larger," Emma pointed out.

There are an estimated 100,000 trucking companies in Indonesia, controlling some five million trucks. However, over 75% of Indonesia's trucking companies have less than 20 trucks, 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 cost-efficient cloud-based solution, 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. Currently, we are entering potential partnerships to around 1,900 truckers via the Indonesia Truck Association (Aptrindo). We are also leveraging partnerships with the Internet of Things startup Lacak.io to further optimize our services and help SME truckers with a centralized cloud solution," Emma said.