Ryn Hermawan and the business of getting unstuck

In January 2015, Ryn Hermawan was explaining the workings of a Lazada warehouse in East Jakarta. There were numbered racks, goods moving through a system linked to online orders, and representatives of five delivery companies ready to process shipments. Valuable electronics had their own secured area. Seventy CCTV cameras watched the operation. Online shopping might look effortless on a phone; behind the screen, somebody had to decide where the boxes went.

Hermawan, then Lazada Indonesia’s senior vice president for operations, knew those decisions in considerable detail. He could explain how long goods stayed in storage and who was allowed into the protected enclosure. Those are modest subjects for a technology executive to discuss. They are also the subjects that determine whether the promised delivery actually arrives.

Later that year, he became a co-founder of Mbiz. The problem changed shape. Businesses needed to find suppliers, compare offers, secure internal approval and complete purchases. A delivery van cannot do much about an unsigned request. Hermawan’s career offers a useful way into this less photogenic corner of commerce: follow a purchase closely enough, and eventually you encounter the person waiting for permission.

Today he is Mbiz’s CEO and co-founder, working on business purchasing and public procurement in Indonesia. The distance from a warehouse to an approval workflow is shorter than it first appears. Both involve handovers. Both depend on people agreeing what happens next. Both become expensive when nobody does.

An education in handovers

His formal education was in international relations and affairs, with a bachelor’s degree completed at Jember in 1998. His working education took place in express logistics. FedEx, Airborne and DHL appear in his career history. At DHL, his responsibilities progressed through service centres, gateway operations and national operations, including a regional project in Vietnam.

The appeal of that background is its specificity. A gateway is an actual place through which shipments must pass. Distribution has routes, staffing requirements and deadlines. Hermawan’s early career made him responsible for the connective work between a commercial promise and its execution. There is little room for a charming explanation when a parcel remains in the wrong building.

In 2012 he moved through Metro Cash & Carry into Lazada Indonesia’s early team. His responsibilities there included distribution strategy and the development of warehouse and delivery operations. It was an opportunity to apply an express operator’s experience to an online retailer still building its physical capabilities.

By early 2015, he was describing two warehouse spaces: 9,600 square metres for storage and 2,400 for support functions. The operation employed 400 people. He also argued that growing online commerce needed improvements in Indonesian logistics if its benefits were to spread. A bigger audience required more than a bigger website.

Lazada’s expansion plans that March included additional freight hubs, with Hermawan discussing intended locations such as Padang, Mataram and Kupang. The geography mattered. Serving customers around Indonesia required decisions about where the network should reach, rather than an assumption that orders would somehow find their own way home.

A shopping cart with a chain of command

Mbiz was established in 2015 and publicly introduced in February 2016. Hermawan spent its early years as chief operating officer and co-founder. The company addressed purchasing by enterprises and government institutions, selling the possibility of a more manageable procurement process.

Consider what that process asks of a buyer: identify a need, locate suitable vendors, compare terms and prices, then negotiate the organisation’s approvals. These are the stages Mbiz set out to simplify. The product sits inside the working habits of a business, where a purchase has to survive more scrutiny than a shopper’s passing enthusiasm.

In 2017, Hermawan described the logistical complication of handling large quantities and oversized goods. Ordinary parcel delivery would not always suffice. He also discussed checks on buyers and vendors, reflecting customers whose compliance requirements formed part of the transaction. A catalogue alone could not answer all of those needs.

His commercial colleague Andik Duana Putra supplied another revealing detail that year: only 1.3 percent of orders came from the group. Mbiz operated under the Lippo umbrella, but the stated ambition was to establish its business with outside customers. That distinction gave its early performance a more demanding test than simply serving a corporate family.

Hermawan said the business had reached profitability by the end of 2016. It was a claim about that early period, rather than a licence to assume anything about subsequent accounts. What it does show is the conversation he was having: customer needs, operational complexity and the economics of providing the service. The glamour budget appears to have been modest.

Room for a camera club

Then comes a detail that makes the operations résumé feel more human. In a 2018 interview about leadership, Hermawan talked about giving employees space for their interests. A photography club was among the examples. There were other activities too, including beauty classes.

He was concerned with whether employees enjoyed working at Mbiz and felt comfortable staying there. His reasoning recognised that work already occupied time that might otherwise be spent with family. The office could make some room for interests beyond the job. He also acknowledged that people retained their own choices about where to work.

This is a useful complication in a story about efficiency. People do not arrive at an office as neatly labelled units of capacity. They bring interests, loyalties and competing demands on their time. Hermawan’s account of those clubs suggests an effort to accommodate that ordinary fact within the company he was building.

A camera club will not approve an invoice. Yet the detail belongs beside the logistics experience. The executive who explains access controls and warehouse processes also has to consider what makes colleagues want to come back tomorrow. The people operating the system have lives outside its diagram.

“Apakah mereka happy bekerja di Mbiz atau tidak.”Ryn Hermawan, 2018
On whether employees are happy working at Mbiz

The door widens in 2019

Mbizmarket arrived in 2019, extending the business towards small and medium-sized enterprises and a wider range of sellers. Hermawan described that market explicitly in the platform’s introduction. The expansion brought the procurement proposition to businesses beyond the large corporate customer.

The leadership around him included technology chief Herdian Yoki Pradipta and commercial chief Andhie Saad. Their descriptions of the platform addressed an integrated purchasing process and opportunities for sellers to reach customers. It is a combination of technical and commercial work: make the transaction function, and give both sides a reason to participate.

Hermawan’s own role changed in August 2022, when he became CEO after seven years as COO. The sequence matters. He had spent years working on the operation before assuming the chief executive title. Mbiz’s later public-sector work would require cooperation with officials, suppliers and banks, each with a different responsibility in the same purchase.

In March 2023, Mbizmarket brought together procurement officials from cities and regencies across Central Java for a dialogue in Magelang. They exchanged practical experience of buying through government-linked online marketplaces. The discussions included helping suppliers register and learn to present their goods. Adoption, in this setting, involved teaching people how to take part.

By that point, Mbizmarket reported more than Rp1.5 trillion in transactions between November 2020 and March 2023. The figure belongs to the platform, not Hermawan personally. Alongside it sat a more everyday task: helping an official or a local seller complete the next transaction correctly.

Blue tents, bank payments and the next handover

In Jepara in December 2025, the story acquired blue tents. Mbizmarket contributed trading tents to a local programme for micro and small businesses. Hermawan encouraged traders to register as suppliers and offered digital procurement training. Physical stalls and online access appeared in the same initiative, an unusually tangible pairing for a marketplace business.

The following February, his comments on East Java procurement focused on connecting purchasing with payment. He described a scheme through which suppliers, particularly smaller businesses, could receive payment within 24 hours. That was the timing he associated with the arrangement, rather than a universal promise for every order.

He also urged participants to keep purchases and payments inside the official marketplace so the transaction remained recorded. For an entrepreneur selling into government, the practical attraction is easy to understand: the process should carry the order through to payment, with a record that can be followed afterwards.

In Bali, an April 2026 launch brought online Kartu Kredit Indonesia payments into the discussion of government procurement. Hermawan’s emphasis remained on connecting the steps within a digital system. The latest work has the familiar shape of his earlier responsibilities: identify where a handover becomes awkward, then arrange a more workable connection.

At the July 2026 Indonesia Catalogue Expo and Forum, he spoke about broadening access for businesses and linking digital purchasing with digital payment. His stated ambition reaches beyond moving a catalogue online. He wants a procurement process that gives institutions clearer records and allows more suppliers to participate.

The career began among parcels, gateways and warehouses. It now reaches into the slower traffic of institutional buying. There is something pleasingly practical about that progression. Someone has to care about the space between selecting an item and receiving it, between accepting an order and getting paid. Hermawan has made a career in those spaces. The next handover is still the job.