Behind the Numbers

Delman helps Indonesian companies navigate through data.

- Elisa Valenta

More companies are using data to make better decisions. These companies try to understand the piles of various data, including those related to product and customer, that they've accumulated over the years. According to research carried out in the Harvard Business Review, companies that have embraced data-driven decision-making are, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their typical peers. However, navigating in the seas of data is not easy and could lead to the wrong conclusion, especially when the information is not yet digitized. This is where companies like Delman.io come in to help scour through datasheets and paper files then sort them into a structured and manageable database. The data is also digitized, which opens up the possibility of data analytics and visualization.

Managing, cleaning and integrating data become more painful as the company growth accelerates. The problems in Indonesia often revolve around unstructured or unsuitable data, either traditionally managed or handled by an inexperienced team, and it took a lot of upfront investment to solve, says Delman CEO Surya Sanjaya Halim.

Delman is industry-agnostic, with clients ranging from large corporations, multinational companies, consulting firms to government agencies, such as the Indonesian Ministry of Finance, PwC, and smart-city platform Qlue.

The company was founded by Surya, Raymond Christopher Sitorus, and Theodorus Ivan Budiyanto, who were classmates at the University of California, Berkeley. The three also took jobs at several tech companies in the Silicon Valley after they graduated in 2016. Raymond once worked as a software engineer at Google Ads, and Theo used to be a full-stack engineer at Splunk, a San Francisco-based big data company.