Mikatasa Sticks to AWS to Paint a Digital Customer Experience

From choosing that perfect color for the living room wall to sticking ceramic tiles on the bathroom floor, paints and adhesives have been long-standing home décor essentials. However, for the many Indonesians living outside the country’s major cities, retail outlets can be few and sparse, so access to these essentials can be a challenge.

To improve accessibility, Mikatasa Agung (Mikatasa) has dedicated its resources to building its distribution network to more than 15,000 retail outlets, offering high quality paints and adhesives for retail and corporate customers in Indonesia for over 40 years. The family-run business strives to become the leading adhesives and coatings manufacturer in the country, driven by technology to support all areas of its business.

However, Mikatasa’s road to transforming its business through technology hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Since its founding in 1976, Mikatasa has traditionally relied on numerous pen-and-paper processes. For example, in its quest to understand market conditions across Indonesia’s disparate islands, Mikatasa was using sales tracking reports that took days to produce manually and were prone to calculation errors. “This manual process significantly slowed down our ability to make decisions and respond to market changes,” says Martin Fu, managing director at Mikatasa Agung.

In 2015, as part of its culture for continuous innovation, the company sought to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would limit manual tasks and reduce human errors on reports and orders. It deployed its ERP system on premises, with a goal of improving report generation and to sync up Mikatasa’s headquarters with its large sales force. However, after three years running its system on premises, the business yearned for greater agility. It also realized that while an on-premises solution might seem easier on the pocket at first glance, there are plenty of hidden maintenance and replacement costs in addition to opportunity costs of idle equipment.

Mikatasa began exploring and trialing several cloud solutions, including solutions from a local cloud provider, but eventually turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We realized that a cloud solution would be key to our continued operations, and we couldn’t afford any risks. With our previous local cloud provider, we experienced multiple episodes of downtime as well as a data leak. We needed a secure and established cloud provider for this reason, and AWS met all our requirements.”

As part of its move to the AWS Cloud, Mikatasa partnered with Kano Solutions to support the migration of its ERP system, which was completed in under two months. Kano Solutions became a trusted aide in establishing Mikatasa’s AWS Cloud infrastructure and automating time-consuming tasks such as database management with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). Mikatasa now uses AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory to administer its ERP system and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage and archiving customer data.

Furthermore, by right-sizing architecture and deploying serverless workloads using AWS Lambda, Kano Solutions found that the total cost of ownership using the AWS Cloud versus on-premises servers was 30 percent lower.

The business now runs all of its core workloads on the AWS Cloud and reports are generated automatically from its ERP system in near real-time. “Having access to readily available reports has allowed us to become nimbler in responding to market opportunities and serving our customers,” Fu says.

Before its migration, Mikatasa had to dedicate its IT team of 30 people to perform backend tasks, such as server maintenance and computer and printer repairs. “It used to be extremely inefficient,” Fu admits. “By using the AWS Cloud, we have reduced the number of people needed to maintain our ERP system by 50 percent.”

As a result, the IT team can now focus on developing frontend solutions, such as the company’s website and the UI/UX of its existing platforms. For instance, Mikatasa has created a new ecommerce ordering site that establishes a direct line of communication with its customers, and enables customers residing in suburban areas to gain easy access to products. Previously, customers could only make orders through physical appointments with the sales team, and communication was sometimes inaccurate or undelivered. Now, they can log in on Mikatasa’s website to place their orders directly and even check in on their order statuses.

Other internal stakeholders at Mikatasa have also benefitted from this productivity boost. For example, the IT team used to get about 30 tickets per day regarding technical issues, but now receives little to no complaints about its system. “Since moving to AWS, our IT team members can focus their time on creating new features rather than fixing existing ones,” Fu comments.

Mikatasa’s salespersons are now equipped with tablets that facilitate and improve the accuracy of order-taking, which customers appreciate. The tablets also allow Mikatasa to gather data about customers’ purchasing patterns and its physical stores, supported with pictures and videos. As a result, visibility has improved, allowing the company to leverage such data for future analytics activities.

“We can minimize risk while improving accessibility to data, which is really the beauty of the cloud: data is independent of individuals and can be accessed whenever, from any device,” Fu concludes. “Looking ahead, our focus is to do more with the data we’re collecting from the field. We’re building layers and layers of information on top of raw data, and AWS provides us with the convenience of accessing that data, analyzing it, and facilitating information sharing.”

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