And with the coronavirus pandemic increasing demand for deliveries, there is an acute need for digitalisation and greater efficiency.

According to a report last year by Katadata Insight Center and logistics and warehouse aggregator Shipper, the industry has been “slowly adopting” digitalisation at varying speeds, while “intermediaries along the supply chain remain fragmented”.

Problems in the sector have drawn the attention of President Joko Widodo, who in June 2020 ordered a restructuring of the national logistics ecosystem to improve its performance, investment climate and the broader economy’s competitiveness.

Jakarta-based startup Transporta, which was founded in January of last year, is one of the players aiming to speed up that process — no easy task in a country spanning more than 5,000km from east to west, three time zones and with a population of over 270 million — the world’s fourth largest.

Operating with a team of just eight people — its three co-founders and five other employees — it aims to maximise trucking companies’ speed and vehicle utilisation.

Using its own cloud-based transportation management system, Transporta provides users with a dashboard that integrates fleet management, GPS tracking, accounting and human resource functions.

The system has features that enable companies to more easily keep tabs on order management, documentation, customer relationship management, delivery schedules, live tracking and finances. It also uses local startup Lacak.io’s tracking technology to enhance GPS accuracy for updates in real-time.

Emma Hartono, Transporta’s chief operating officer, said Indonesia’s trucking industry has seen rising demand for deliveries, thanks to increasing e-commerce transactions and demand for healthcare-related shipments because of the pandemic.

But trucking is “the most lagging in terms of technology adoption” compared with other industries nationwide, Hartono told Nikkei Asia. She added that many companies still manually record and issue delivery logs, hampering efficiency.

“Manual entry means you don’t store data well” as “everything is in paper form”, she said, calling it “unanalysed data” that hinders innovation.

More broadly, digitalisation is making inroads in Indonesia.

According to the e-Conomy SEA 2021 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company, the country has gained 21 million new digital consumers from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic through the first half of last year.

It added that Indonesia’s internet economy reached US$70 billion in 2021. It expects the figure to more than double to US$146 billion in 2025.

Hartono said that most trucking companies in Indonesia, which she said number around 450,000, some very small, are managed by baby boomers — those born from around the second half of the 1940s to the first half of the 1960s — the age group she said finds it “the most difficult” to adopt new technology.

Still, the situation is “improving, but at a very slow pace”. Hartono said. “So most trucking companies are at a point of saying: ‘I want to go digital, but I don’t know how.'”

As for truckers themselves, the challenges of Indonesia’s vast geography are compounded by increasing demand for their services.

Behind the wheel since 1996, Nuratmo, who like many Indonesians uses a single name, said numerous drivers are under intense pressure to deliver products on time, resulting in inadequate rest.

“That is a common thing among driver friends … long-distance drivers are used to sleeping for an hour, two hours” before continuing on, said the 42-year-old.

Nuratmo, who also heads Paguyuban Driver Tegal-Brebes, a group that assists some 200 drivers across the country, said a fellow driver told him that shipping a cargo of 30 to 40 tons of pipe and steel from Jakarta to Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh on Sumatra could take eight to 10 days by land, a journey that includes a ferry crossing.

He added that he relies on a personal smartphone application for navigation without any digital support from his company. But because the app is geared for passenger cars, it often suggests routes ill-suited for large trucks. “It often happens like that,” Nuratmo said.

Setijadi, chairman of research and consulting company Supply Chain Indonesia (SCI), said logistics digitalisation could improve supply chain management, adding that the infrastructure and supply and distribution imbalance causes prices of goods in the nation’s east to be higher than in the west.

Setijadi said the 16 provinces on Java and Sumatra account for around 80% of the nation’s gross domestic product, with the other 18 provinces making up the rest.

SCI forecasts Indonesia’s logistics sector could be worth 699.1 trillion rupiah (US$48.8 billion) this year, based on Statistics Indonesia data from the third quarter of 2021. That would mark an increase of just over 1% versus 2021.

Despite the size of the market, Setijadi said the government and industry’s logistics digitalization efforts are “still lacking.”

“So far, in some cases, we have seen that prices of some commodities have gone up, not because the goods are not available, but because we cannot monitor their locations. In certain areas, there is a shortage. But in other places, there is a surplus,” Setijadi said.

“If we can map the system … we can get accurate data. Then we can process and analyse it. We can anticipate various things with one goal: back to matching supply and demand,” he added.

Hartono, meanwhile, said Transporta, which aims to become a “tech enabler” rather than a digital logistics company in competition with trucking companies, has so far registered 82 trucks and will continue to partner with GPS providers.

“We focus more on supporting them to grow,” Hartono said, warning that they need help to thrive.

She doesn’t want to see “local businesses in this industry get beaten up by players from outside”, referring to foreign logistics companies from the US, Europe and Japan.