Tea is the second favorite beverage after water globally (Exhibit 1) due to the fact that it gives health benefits, such as increasing the function of blood vessel, battling the fatigue, decreasing the cholesterol ratio and keeping our body fit. Such benefits can be obtained by drinking tea routinely for about four to six times a day. People are consuming tea on daily basis for these benefits and the growing population has created a big market for worldwide tea producers including Indonesian market. Indonesia as a country itself has been a major tea producer and ranks as the seventh on the world’s largest tea producers list supported by large consumer increase. Sariwangi, a domestic brand, was introduced back in 1973 with a ‘tea bag’ concept. This was a fresh and modern concept comparing to old concept tea which was the brewed tea. This concept made Sariwangi able to crawl to the top of tea market easily and became the biggest tea bag brand in Indonesia. In 1989, Unilever Indonesia, a consumer goods company has acquitted brand Sariwangi and started to act as the distributor of Sariwangi. For over 40 years, the brand Sariwangi has committed to give the best quality of tea for Indonesian tea consumer with lot of campaigns and innovations in between. The founder company has wished to increase the tea production and invested a large sum of money in drainage system. However the outcome didn’t go as expected and left them in a big debt. Big debt as well as the decreasing tea export volume resulted in bankruptcy of the founder company of Sariwangi in 2018 as the tea bag of the brand Sariwangi will still be produced by Unilever Indonesia.

In 2008, Kaskus was voted as one of the most visited Indonesian websites according to Alexa.com. Kaskus was an online forum community which had grown by the word of mouth marketing of its members and mainly consisted of a user-generated content forum and a trading section. This local forum already had more than 350,000 loyal members who called themselves “Kaskusers” and participated in their own community culture. Kaskus contained a discussion forum with sub-forums covering a variety of topics including games, the buying and selling of goods, sports, automotives, and many others. What was unique about Kaskus was that it maintained all of its content in Bahasa Indonesia.

Its notorious BB-17 forum which mainly consisted of porn content, was heavily associated with KASKUS by the Indonesian Internet community. This burdened KASKUS’s image and its attempt to capture the tremendous growth of Internet users in Indonesia at that time. Facebook, Friendster and other online social networks has been grown explosively in Indonesia. At the same time, a new law on information and electronic media, Law No.11/2008 on Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE), came into effect and ruled that websites should not contain pornographic content. Therefore KASKUS were left with no choice but to drop BB-17. However, building a new positive image would be no an easy task.

With the new board of management, Ken Dean Lawadinata (CEO), Andrew Darwis (founder, CIO) and Danny Oei Wirianto (CMO), Kaskus was facing a dilemma whether they should remain exclusive or becoming a mainstream online content.

When Alwin Albar was assigned as the head of information system (IT) in late 2007, Timah was running an outdated software package to support its core transaction processing. His CEO, Wachid Usman, required a system that can be accurate and contain live information about the business. Timah needed a system that would give it better visibility of the performance of Timah’s diverse operation. Timah had implemented SAP software, but to get the level of information it wanted, the company required the ability to monitor data from production to sales and beyond. In addition, Timah required a supply-chain operation – from mining, production, and distribution – integrated with the company’s financial statement in order to increase its efficiency, as well as to provide the board with the ability to formulate faster and more accurate decision-making capabilities, thereby facilitating the conversion of product from the pit to the customer.

After approval and full support from the CEO, Wachid Usman, Timah prepared a detailed plan to execute this IT strategy. This was not an easy task. The existing platform used an old, legacy architecture that became obsolete when maintenance support ended in 2009.