Wijy Wijaya faced a huge hurdle in the third year of running her store in Tebet, Jakarta. Bakwan Juwarak, which sells Pontianak-style vegetable fritters, suffered a 22 percent decline in sales when COVID-19 broke out in the city in early 2020.
In an effort to salvage her business, Wijy implemented several new strategies she learned through Digitarasa, a food merchant accelerator program of GoFood, superapp Gojek’s food delivery service arm. Doing so helped her cut some operational costs, innovate her products and expand Bakwan Juwarak’s social media presence in her efforts to gain more GoFood orders.
“Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God), our revenue was able to bounce back close to Ramadhan in May 2020,” Wijy said at the Jakpost UpClose webinar on Jan. 28 titled “Forging a post-pandemic digital future for Indonesian SMEs”.
The webinar, held in partnership with Gojek Indonesia, explored how digital transformation could help small-scale business owners like Wijy to adapt and thrive during the economic slowdown amid the health crisis.
Unexpectedly, the public health emergency has opened an opportunity to accelerate digital transformation among Indonesia’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as seen in a recent study by UNDP and the University of Indonesia Institute for Economic and Social Research (LPEM FEB UI).
The study surveyed 1,180 SMEs across 15 provinces and found that 44 percent had joined online marketplaces or e-commerce platforms in the wake of the pandemic.
President director Leonard Theosabrata of SMESCO, an SME training and facilitation institution under the Cooperatives and SMEs Ministry, said the government had three SME capacity-building objectives.
“The first is digital transformation. The second is supply chain transformation, to enable SMEs to supply large-scale industries here and abroad,” Leonard said at the webinar. The third was data gathering, as most Indonesian SMEs were unregistered, informal businesses.
He said the government was working to achieve these three objectives through various programs, including SMESCO’s incubation program and a Rp 2.4 million (US$161) cash assistance targeting 9.1 million SMEs. Additionally, the government was encouraging e-commerce platforms to support the digital transformation of SMEs.
Bayu Ramadhan, Gojek Indonesia’s vice president of merchant marketing, said the superapp provided a holistic ecosystem for SMEs to manage all aspects of their businesses, from marketing and order management to logistics and payments.
The company also offered incubation and community programs which had has encouraged more SMEs to sign on as merchant partners with Gojek.
“Gojek merchant partners in Southeast Asia increased 80 percent to 900,000. This is quite impressive, considering that we needed nine years to achieve the first 500,000 merchants,” said Bayu.
He said the rapid growth showed that many SMEs had embraced digital transformation to survive the pandemic. Meanwhile, aside from improved ease of doing business, digital platforms offered SMEs access to a bigger market as more consumers adopted digital transactions and services.
A separate study by the University of Indonesia Institute of Demography (LD UI) shows that the majority of individual respondents used online food delivery services (97 percent) and online shipping services (76 percent).
CEO Monica Christa of BLP Beauty said that shifting from a manual to a digital payment system had boosted the cosmetics company’s operational efficiency as well as lowering her team’s overall stress levels.
“When we launched our brand in 2016, our website crashed due to higher-than-expected traffic. We still processed our payments manually at that time, resulting in great chaos,” she recalled during the webinar.
Monica said the experience shocked the BLP Beauty team into immediately digitalizing their payment system.
“Eventually in 2017, we relaunched our brand after we had digitalized our entire payment system, from processing to the payment gateway. Now, we are able to process 4,000 orders in a single day because we are using our own app. Before, it took two to three days to process 200 orders, which was not only tiring but also stressful,” she said. (yps)
