JAKARTA -- Overland logistics pose daunting challenges in Indonesia -- an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that comprises Southeast Asia's largest economy. And with the coronavirus pandemic increasing demand for deliveries, there is an acute need for digitalization 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" digitalization 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 5,000 km 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 maximize trucking companies' speed and vehicle utilization. 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 health care-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 "unanalyzed data" that hinders innovation.

More broadly, digitalization 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 $70 billion in 2021. It expects the figure to more than double to $146 billion in 2025.