His brother was living in Singapore, however, and encouraged him to return to Southeast Asia. On a visit to Singapore, he met Lee Oi Kum, a director in a family business that runs one of the largest oil palm and rubber plantation businesses in Southeast Asia. She encouraged him to use his tech skills to distribute software to revolutionize plantations in the region, and he made a leap back to Southeast Asia.

Ferron Haryanto, founder of eKomoditi

A fundamental problem for plantations, Ferron explains, is that owners and managers cannot easily track what happens on their land. A plantation covers thousands of hectares, and workers are on their own in the fields. Plantations that are not run well may destroy rainforests, have labor issues, or deploy hazardous chemicals. Managers may calculate workers’ hours incorrectly or not give the right amount of cash for wages. Workers might take supplies to the wrong location or stay in one place and not work.

 

If Ferron could get the businesses to adopt digital platforms and sensors — with everything from material management and facial recognition for staff to managing fertilizer and using QR codes or NFC cards to track palm oil fruit — they could make the businesses more transparent and manage them better.

Ferron founded eKomoditi in 2015 to distribute software that digitizes palm oil, durian, sugar, and rubber plantations, which enables the owners to plan harvesting, track workers’ attendance, trace products and more – all digitally.

 

He originally planned to distribute software developed for a large Malaysian palm oil plantation. It was not easily adaptable for other plantations, however, so Ferron decided to use his tech skills to develop a flexible, new, Android-based solution that meets his original goals. While the software he created was intended for the palm oil industry, clients now include a large private sugar company in Indonesia and one of the largest coconut companies in Southeast Asia. It has been installed at 14 plantations so far, in Indonesia and Malaysia. “Our goal is to digitize Southeast Asian agriculture for operational efficiency,” Ferron said, “and then for sustainability.”

Having long been involved in technology and agriculture herself, Oi Kum has supported eKomoditi since its inception, since it fits with her firm’s impact goals of investing in R&D for the industry and supporting innovation.

The biggest challenge, Ferron said, has been technological literacy. “There is no internet. People don’t have technological or financial literacy. Most plantations run on pen and paper. We have to fit in with their limited infrastructure, and even do old-school batch processing.”

“When I go to a plantation,” Ferron said, “I study their challenges, collect data, and modify the system for them. They don’t have data, so we start with data collection for materials, HR, and production.”

 

While implementation has become faster, it’s a far cry from the software at tech firms like Oracle that he worked at and is highly personalized. “We have to fit our technology into theirs, which might be legacy technology – or none at all. We can’t expect someone in a plantation to be using AI. People have to understand how the system would help them.”

 

Palm oil plantation fruit counter using eKomoditi application to track details of palm quality and quantity that is harvested

“We started by making the platform easy to use,” Ferron said. The first few clients were difficult. eKomoditi discounted the price, offered flexible payments, and had high expenses for the six months it took to do mapping and training. “We’re often the first Android device the workers have used, so we have to train them. They can’t call tech support. We make the user manual easy to follow.”

 

Now, potential clients do a short pilot in one or two of their plantation divisions and roll the software out at all eight or ten divisions after they see how useful it is.

“The impact of eKomoditi is really straightforward,” Ferron said. “In agriculture, there is no existing data. GPS coordinates, the time workers came in, whether they were efficient, and whether production is in a legal area was not measured. When you make the operations transparent, the impact is huge.”

 

Facial recognition, GPS coordinates, and time stamps for each staff are recorded, and staff are tracked to make sure daily work plan is followed

The large plantations that are eKomoditi’s forte usually have at least 400 to 600 workers. Staff now use facial recognition when they log in or out, and the software also tracks road maintenance, pruning, fertilizer usage and drivers’ locations. “When you go digital, it’s easy to calculate,” Ferron said. “Workers are fairly compensated. Payroll goes directly into their bank account. There is transparency over whether too much fertilizer was used, whether it was organic. For palm oil, we can track every fruit to a specific block. The truck driver has a device, so we know it’s not from an area in the rainforest and it went to the mill.”

The next angle of impact, Ferron said, is sustainable financing. Companies can share data with banks to receive incentivized loans. “When you maximize production per hectare, the bank will give you a reduced interest rate.”

Moreover, “every palm oil tree must be replanted every 25 years,” Ferron explained. “We also want to help the plantations do responsible replanting.

 

Palm oil plantation staff using eKomoditi application to keep a record of internal driver and vehicle shipment details for each truck

Ferron even wants to restore the thousands of abandoned coal mines in Indonesia. “If they want to plant something, they need to restore the soil and then plant. You can also capture carbon if you do it right. Without us, the coal mine would be barren.”

 

While Ferron’s journey back to Indonesia was unexpected, it has been personally satisfying. Enabling companies to digitize, produce more, reduce costs, and make palm oil or other commodities sustainable has had a tremendous positive impact on people, plantations, and the planet.