Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world to form a single state and consists of five main islands and 30 smaller archipelagos, totalling 18,110 islands and islets of which about 6,000 are inhabited.
The AC Ventures report, Logistics Landscape in Indonesia, noted that the traditional supply chain in Indonesia is typically comprised of multiple layers prior to reaching retail and/or end customers (see Figure one).
The AC Ventures report also noted that the eCommerce boom has had the positive effect of expanding last-mile logistics into newer delivery service models to accommodate consumers' demand, including on-demand point-to-point delivery and relay delivery to traditional conventional delivery.
Delivering products even
Accenture's The Cloud First CFO Study – 2022 edition reveals that in a survey of 740 finance leaders across 15 industries and 11 countries, 39% say the CFO now leads the cloud journey for the whole enterprise.
The report claims that CFOs are using the cloud to transform their own finance functions, introducing greater speed, agility, and automated intelligence to finance operations. The report also acknowledged that despite understanding the value that the cloud can bring to the enterprise, CFOs concede that realising that value amid seemingly competing priorities is difficult to achieve in practice.
A subsidiary of the Lion Air Group, Lion Parcel is the logistics company that serves nationwide express door-to-door delivery for international and local shipments.
Lion Parcel's head of finance, Riza Nurfadhli, acknowledged that Indonesia's logistics has been growing exponentially for the past few years. "This growth has driven technology adoption and behaviour changes across the industry trend and customers, triggering the acceleration of various shopping platforms: social commerce, e-commerce, and other forms of online shopping in Indonesia," he continued.
Nurfadhli explained that the growth has provided high demand for Lion Parcel, which currently provides services for domestic and international deliveries. The delivery covers 98% area of Indonesia and 41 international countries to date.
What makes the cloud attractive to finance leaders
It is this business growth that has given impetus to Lion Parcel to host its enterprise business applications in the cloud to enable it to engage its 7,000 partners.
"This wide infrastructure and network required us to improve our business processes by adopting and implementing more technology transformation, in this case: the cloud," added Nurfadhli.
He pointed out that the improvement was expected to enable Lion Parcel to accelerate its services, integrate the business process, and help the company in data management, including accessing, calculating, and analysing. All of these will help Lion Parcel in providing a better seamless service experience for the customers.
Looking inward, Nurfadhli said the setup has accelerated the real-time decision-making process, including financial management. "This cover maximising the workload of the financial team, automating the financial administration process, as well as easing the financial data analysis," he added.
The benefits of integration
Nurfadhli acknowledged that the company's implementation of ODOO for its ERP and CRM needs, and the of the cloud to integrate all the data has helped the company to improve its financial management and onboard automatic processes on the administration side.
"The integration eased all the stakeholders and pillars across the business enabling us to run together and drive better results with rapid system adoption."
Riza Nurfadhli
He conceded that fully running all the systems at a rapid pace required good user knowledge. "Therefore, a specific timeline was needed to prepare the ecosystem to make sure it will be going well: the system & platform itself, user knowledge, infrastructure readiness such as devices, as well as data migration," he elaborated.
Important learnings in the move to the cloud
Asked to share his team's learnings with the adoption of finance in the cloud, Nurfadhli listed three areas: data migration and validation, user knowledge, and infrastructure.
When it came to data migration and validation, Nurfadhli recalled that during the preparation of server migration from offline to online and pooling them to the cloud, the team discovered that they had data in various formats including paper, digital in the form of Word, pdf, spreadsheets, etc.
It was, therefore, necessary to undertake a data consolidation and validation process to check that all of the information, including cost and assets, were accurate, create a company-wide data format standard, and eventually synchronise all the data, and upload to a central repository.
"To speed up and ease all of the processes, we form a special task force team to specifically work on this project," Nurfadhli added.
User Knowledge: every user has a different learning curve. Hence, it is important to set a specific timeline dedicated to training. "What we did was separate the training into three sessions: pre, during, and post-live of the platform. Furthermore, we also have a dedicated product team who is ready to help users during the first adoption period the first 1-2 weeks. Therefore, we can boost user knowledge more effectively," he elaborated.
Infrastructure: on top of the good and reliable platform, it is necessary to make sure that the overall IT infrastructure in the company is ready for migration. A high-performance platform needs to be supported by a high-performance device. Hence it is necessary to audit all the hardware needed, upgrade and allocate special investment to the infrastructure for more sustainable system results.
Lessons from the cloud adoption
According to Nurfadhli, cloud servers and platforms provided a huge impact on Lion Parcel, especially in its financial management. The implementation also helps the team to achieve efficiency across several aspects:
Operation: the cloud platform helps Lion Parcel to implement a more efficient operation process, as it gathers all the data, including shipping status, revenue, and payment across Indonesia. This will also affect the shipment status transparency for customers and the seamless internal operational team process. This improvement helps the finance team to track all the package movement and eases the finance's team ability to track revenue and claim.
Team workload: Several automated processes, especially in financial management, are helping Lion Parcel's finance team maximise the resources that it has. An additional benefit, according to Nurfadhli, is the team workload is now more manageable and manpower allocation more efficient – further promising to reduce operational costs.
Business decision-making: all those improvements accelerate Lion Parcel management to analyse case by case, based on facts and data provided. Nurfadhli says the finance team can now make a real-time and data-based decision that is more accurate and time efficient.
Areas for improvement
Reflecting on its experiences to date, Nurfadhli is grateful for the outcomes that the transformation has delivered so far. Any area that he felt may be subject to improvement is around the project implementation timeline – in particular, additional time spent allocated to user training and conducting the training earlier in the journey to make sure everyone is on the same page with similar knowledge – in parallel with the system development process.
"In addition, data standardisation can be done as early as possible to accelerate the adoption and transition of digital financial management. It will certainly be more time efficient for all parties," said Nurfadhli.
Advice for finance teams moving to the cloud
Nurfadhli acknowledged that the company's use of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and cloud platforms are two important things that helped ease and lead financial management across the company.
"It (ERP and cloud) will help you to go through a seamless and more automated process, ease the monitoring process of the data and team management optimization, as well as have a clearer benchmark to analyse," he concluded.
* Editor’s note: Lion Parcel is the winner in the FutureCFO Excellence Awards 2023 in the category of Most Innovative Use of Cloud, Platforms and Ecosystems.
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