Indonesian businesses are digitising at a remarkable speed. The country’s digital economy grew 14% in 2025, approaching US$100 billion in gross merchandise value, and almost every rupiah of that growth flows through a software platform of some kind. The catch is that each platform was adopted to solve one problem, for one team, at one moment in time. Multiply that across sales, marketing, finance and logistics, and the result is system sprawl: a stack of disconnected tools that each hold a fragment of the truth.
To break down data silos, businesses first need to understand how the silos formed. In Indonesia, the answer is simply the boom’s speed.
The anatomy of system sprawl in a growing Indonesian business
Consider the technology footprint of a typical mid-sized consumer brand in Jakarta or Surabaya today:
- E-commerce platforms. Shopee is now used by more than half of Indonesian internet users, with TikTok Shop reaching a further 27%, so most brands maintain storefronts on several marketplaces at once, each with its own seller centre and data exports.
- Digital payment systems. QRIS alone processed 6.05 billion transactions across 39.3 million merchants in the first half of 2025, and most businesses also accept e-wallets, bank transfers and cards, each settling through a different gateway.
- CRM and marketing tools. Customer records accumulate in CRM systems, WhatsApp Business, email platforms and loyalty applications.
- Logistics and fulfilment applications. Orders move through courier dashboards, warehouse systems and marketplace-native fulfilment programmes, each tracking the same shipment in a different place.
This mirrors the global pattern. The 2025 State of SaaS research from BetterCloud found that organisations run an average of 106 SaaS applications. Salesforce’s 2025 MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report puts the figure at 897 applications for larger enterprises, with only 29% of them connected to one another.
What data silos actually cost
Disconnected systems generate three compounding costs:
Data silos across departments
When 71% of applications sit outside the integrated core, every department works from its own version of reality. The MuleSoft research found that 90% of IT leaders say data silos are creating business challenges in their organisation.
Manual operational processes
Silos are bridged by people. Staff download CSV files from one seller centre and upload them into the accounting system. They copy order details into courier portals. They maintain master spreadsheets by hand. Every one of these tasks grows with order volume, so the cost of fragmentation rises in lockstep with revenue.
Duplicate workflows and reconciliation work
The same order can exist in five systems: the marketplace, the payment gateway, the warehouse application, the courier dashboard and the accounting ledger. Reconciling those five records consumes enormous effort. The MuleSoft benchmark found that IT teams already spend around 39% of their time building and testing custom integrations just to keep data moving, and that effort still leaves most applications disconnected.
Why manual fixes fail at digital-economy speed
Spreadsheet bridges and point-to-point custom scripts can survive a business doing hundreds of orders a month. Indonesia’s growth curve breaks them. Video commerce transaction volumes rose 90% in a single year to 2.6 billion transactions. Custom scripts also create their own fragility: each new platform, API change or staff departure puts the whole web of connections at risk.
How integration platforms break down data silos
This is the problem that integration platforms as a service (iPaaS) were built to solve. Tools such as Celigo and Workato sit between your applications and keep data flowing automatically through pre-built, monitored connections. In practice, this delivers:
- Integration across digital platforms. Marketplace orders, payment settlements, CRM records and shipment updates flow into a single operational core, typically an ERP such as NetSuite, without manual exports.
- Workflow automation. Routine sequences such as order capture, invoice creation, stock adjustment and fulfilment notification run end-to-end without human touchpoints, so headcount can stay focused on exceptions and growth.
- One version of the truth. Every department reads from the same synchronised data set, which makes reporting faster and decisions sounder.
The PS Global Consulting approach
PS Global Consulting helps Indonesian businesses audit their application landscape, identify the silos that cost the most, and deploy solutions to integrate e-commerce, payments, CRM and logistics systems around a NetSuite core. As a multi-year winner of NetSuite’s Asean Partner of the Year award, we have seen how quickly a connected stack converts operational drag into operating leverage.
System sprawl is the natural by-product of fast growth. Left unaddressed, it becomes the limit on that growth. Speak to our team first about where integration can remove the most friction in your business.
