Rekan
Turning 27,000 fertilizer kiosks across Indonesia into a connected point-of-sale — so a company that sells through partners it doesn't own can finally see what's happening on the ground.
The one thing Rekan does
Rekan turns every fertilizer kiosk in Indonesia into a connected point-of-sale, so a company that sells through 27,000 partners it doesn't own can finally see, in real time, what's happening on the ground.
PT Pupuk Indonesia is one of the largest fertilizer producers in Asia. But between the factory and the farmer sits a layer the company had almost no visibility into: 27,136 independent kiosks and retailers spread across the entire archipelago. These partners recorded sales on paper, tracked farmer debt in notebooks, and reported stock by hand — if at all.
Rekan is the product I helped design and ship to close that gap. One app, in the hands of every kiosk owner, that records the transaction and sends the signal back home.
Why this was harder than "just build a POS"
The counter-intuitive part: the users we were designing for were not e-commerce shoppers or tech-savvy operators. Our research surfaced a clear persona — kiosk owners aged 45–60, often low digital literacy, sometimes operating in areas with weak or no signal.
So the usual playbook — "ship a slick POS, users will adapt" — was the wrong one. If the app demanded fluency the user didn't have, adoption would die quietly. And a half-adopted POS produces worse data than paper, because it lies about coverage.
That reframing drove every design decision: the win wasn't a feature-rich app, it was an app a 55-year-old kiosk owner in a low-signal village would actually open every morning. Simplicity wasn't a nicety here. It was the entire strategy.
I owned the user experience and interface design end-to-end, and I built the user personas — Agus Sutarya and Udin Saputra — from surveys, in-depth interviews, field observation, and FGDs with real kiosk operators. Those personas became the gravity that kept the whole product honest.
What Rekan actually is
Rekan is not one screen; it's a retail operating system disguised as a simple app. Four pillars:
Point of Sale (the core). Daily transaction recording and farmer-debt (utang) tracking. The kiosk owner logs a sale in seconds and sees today's revenue on the home screen — the same way a shopkeeper glances at the till.
Stock & supply chain. Real-time stock detection at the kiosk so the supply chain upstream never goes blind. When stock runs low, the network knows before the farmer is turned away.
Farmer profiling & gamification. A points and rewards layer ("Petani Sejahtera") that captures who the buyers are — the first time the company could profile its end customers at retail, not just guess at them.
Order management. Kiosks order from distributors directly inside the app, with delivery, and payment by direct bank transfer or paylater — turning a phone call and a paper PO into a tracked, financed transaction.
Underneath, every transaction — on the order of 3–4 million notes per month — flows into the company's Data Lake, so what used to be invisible retail activity becomes advanced analytics: market share, pricing, demand prediction, customer churn.
The proof
- IDC Future Enterprise Award 2022 — Best in Future of Industry Ecosystem, Asia-Pacific
- Gold Stevie Award 2023 — Innovation in Shopping or E-commerce Apps
- 100,000+ combined downloads and 15,000+ average daily active users — direct evidence that an app built for low-literacy, low-signal users was one they actually kept opening.
- ISO 27001 certified — and the auditor (BSI) marked Rekan's process area as exceeding expectations, naming it "Man of the Match" and a benchmark model for every other digital application in the holding.
- Copyright (HAKI) registered with Indonesia's Ministry of Law & Human Rights.
- First adoption of cloud-based auto-scaling microservice architecture inside the entire Pupuk Indonesia Holding, running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Who this is really for
It's easy to talk about 27,000 kiosks as a number. The people inside that number are why the design mattered.
There's the kiosk owner who used to lose an entire afternoon reconciling handwritten notes, never quite sure if the farmer who bought on credit last month had paid. There's the farmer at the back of the line who didn't know whether the fertilizer was even in stock until he'd already made the trip.
Designing for them meant resisting the instinct to make the app impressive and committing to making it kind — large tap targets, plain language, a home screen that answers the only question that matters first. When a 55-year-old shop owner installs an app on the first try and tells you it made his bookkeeping disappear, that's not a metric. That's the point.
The journey
Rekan is, at heart, a challenge plot: a manufacturing company trying to do something genuinely hard — earn real-time sight into a retail network of partners it has no formal control over, across thousands of islands, through users the tech industry usually designs past.
We didn't get there in one leap. We got there through two years of iteration — surveying kiosk owners, watching them stumble on a screen, rebuilding it, shipping again. Every loop taught me something about designing for the person in front of you instead of the person you wish you had.
That foundation is exactly what made the next chapter possible — when the government asked Pupuk Indonesia to digitize the entire subsidized-fertilizer flow, and Rekan evolved into iPubers (now the Rekanesia design system).