Jakarta, Indonesia – In its effort to digitize the logistics industry, Transporta, the Indonesian-based transport management system startup, has launched a free trial of its transport management system (TMS) for SMEs in the logistics sector.
Transporta’s solutions give a bird’s eye-view of logistics operations through a centralized cloud platform, which enables truckers to maximize the speed of their daily operations and utilize resources such as routes, truck space, and petrol usage.
The initiative aims to assist SME truckers, with 20 or fewer trucks in their fleets, to swiftly adapt to the country’s digital migration and rise in e-commerce activity, allowing them to use the firm’s TMS services at no charge for up to 75 trips per month.
According to Transporta, the initiative also seeks to tackle two problems plaguing SMEs’ logistic processes. First is the sudden influx of e-commerce orders from retail customers, which results in SME truckers transporting goods in half-full trucks at a moment’s notice, with empty haul back to origin city and barely any route optimization. And secondly, SME truckers losing out to larger fleets due to the low level of digital adoption and the high cost of logistics solutions.
Emma Hartono, Transporta’s chief operating officer, shared that TMS solutions are expensive, bulky, and more tailored for large-scale fleets, and with this, SME truckers are left in a hard place, doing business manually with Excel.
“Transporta is here to offer help to these SMEs. Our long-term vision is to change highly-manual traditional logistics processes via digitalization, while emphasizing building a community and digital footprint of truckers,” said Emma.
Apart from its TMS solution, Transporta also offers a telemetry system to track each truck in every fleet, providing accurate and updated location information for all assets and building a digital footprint for SME truckers. A key upcoming feature is a community platform to share payload information among SME truckers, which connects to WhatsApp group chats, allowing SMEs to quickly combine their respective fleets and maximize routes to bid on and fulfill larger orders.
Transporta has also announced that it will be debuting its cost-efficient TMS in August, with plans to onboard 10,000 trucking companies over the next three years.