Ralali CEO Joseph Aditya aims to make procurement in Indonesia faster and more transparent

Joseph Aditya, founder and CEO of Ralali

Joseph Aditya is the founder and CEO of Ralali. You may remember his name from earlier this week when his startup closed a US$2.5 million series A funding round led by Japanese investors Beenos Plaza and CyberAgent Ventures.

You may also remember that Ralali is Indonesia’s business-to-business marketplace for maintenance, repair, and operational (MRO) goods. On the site you can find stuff like automotive equipment, generators, machine tools, construction goods, sanitation products, and more. What you may not have realized, however, is that Aditya’s company carries a mission to squash petty corruption in the local MRO space, while also speeding up the procurement process.

“When I started Ralali, we called it an ecommerce market for industrial tools because it was just an easier way to explain what it really is to the public,” says Aditya. “We even had the words ‘industrial tools’ on the name card and everything. […] But what we really are is a B2B tech company that outsources the procurement process for all of these different kinds of MRO goods.”

Plugging the boat hole, taking the captain’s seat

After studying in Australia for 10 years, Aditya returned home to Jakarta. He soon took a job as a sales representative for a local trading company called Tridinamika Jaya Instrument, a firm that specializes in test and measurement instruments for industrial purposes. After eight years, he was able to work his way up to become the managing director of the company. Around the same time, Tridinamika Jaya Instrument found itself approaching bankruptcy. Many of the existing shareholders were selling off their stakes and going into retirement.

Aditya saw this as an opportunity to not just turn the firm around, but also pocket the majority ownership for himself. In the end, he was able to do both, becoming the primary owner of Tridinamika Jaya Instrument. With more than a decade of experience and a rolodex full of contacts, he launched Ralali in January 2013.

According to Aditya, the procurement process for large businesses looking to buy items like safety gear and power tools in bulk is not a sexy undertaking. First, some unlucky individual from the company must hunt for three different vendors that sell a similar product for a side-by-side price comparison. From there, the firm must get approval from the higher-ups, negotiate further, collect multiple invoices, and finally execute the transaction.

“Just doing this for one product can take quite a long time,” says Aditya. “But if you have to buy 100 different products for your company, then suddenly you’re dealing with 300 different vendors […] Also in Indonesia, companies that are big and in need of MRO items don’t always get the best deal […] There is a bunch of petty corruption here where vendors will make under-the-table deals so that the procurement guys go with their products over the others.”

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With Ralali, businesses can circumvent under-the-table dealings that many vendors often get into with MRO procurement people. Like any other ecommerce marketplace, Ralali’s vendor prices are listed transparently on the site, and even if the buyer chooses different vendors for different products, in the end they won’t have to chase multiple companies for the invoicing.

“One of the biggest things we do is cut down on bureaucracy,” explains Aditya. “If procurement folks go through Ralali, buyers get one single invoice with all the price quotes from the different companies. […] In this way, Ralali has two business models, it’s not just a pure marketplace, but also a way for companies to do business process outsourcing.”