Indonesia's SMILE system: reading vaccine stock and cold-chain temperatures across thousands of clinics from one dashboard
Solution case studies are scenarios based on common industry problem patterns. They do not refer to any client and are not MarkasDev project portfolio items. Our client portfolio is published separately.
Industry context
Two years ago today, on 15 October 2024, Indonesia's Minister of Health Budi Gunadi Sadikin soft-launched SATUSEHAT Logistics in Jakarta. His message was short: "Digitalization is one thing, what matters is integration. (Therefore) don't build another platform, use the platform that has been built by UNDP (SMILE), but enhance the capacity so it will benefit more people" (UNDP press release, 15 October 2024). The same release says distribution under SATUSEHAT Logistics runs in real time on SMILE, as mandated by Ministry of Health Decree No. HK.01.07/MENKES/1568/2024.
SMILE (originally Sistem Monitoring Imunisasi Logistik secara Elektronik, the electronic immunization logistics monitoring system, now also described as an electronic health logistics inventory monitoring system) began in 2018 as a pilot in 54 health facilities in Bogor and South Tangerang. The SMILE Annual Report 2021 says the application was first piloted based on India's Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN). It was built by the Ministry of Health with UNDP, with funding support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Government of Japan.
This page is a third-party study of a public case, not a client project. MarkasDev did not build, operate or supply SMILE or SATUSEHAT Logistics. We look at it because the pattern is very close to the daily work of pharmacies, pharmaceutical wholesalers, laboratories, hospitals and distributors that store temperature-sensitive products: stock has to be visible down to the last point, temperature has to be watched outside office hours, and the data has to be trusted enough to plan procurement. We organise the lessons using Diagnose, Deliver and Operate. Every number comes from sources we opened; the full list is at the end of the page.
Problem
According to a UNDP Digital Health for Development Hub case study (February 2025), in 2018 the Ministry of Health only had insight into routine immunization data at the provincial level, with no visibility at the subdistrict and last-mile levels. Non-standard, paper-based processes meant there was no real-time view of stock levels or temperature. The same document says this often led to vaccine wastage, overstocking, stock-outs and, in turn, inadequate coverage because supply did not match demand at the last mile. Reports were produced at the national level, but the data were questioned.
The scale is large. UNDP documents put Indonesia's birth cohort at about 5 million newborns a year, spread over thousands of islands. Vaccines also fail silently: they must be kept at 2–8°C, and UNDP's economic analysis of SMILE (published February 2024) notes that before loggers were installed, vaccine handlers checked cold-chain temperatures manually twice a day within office hours, in line with MoH Regulation No. 12/2017. Temperature was not monitored continuously. The SMILE Annual Report 2021 lists common causes of temperature excursions: power blackouts, flooding, or equipment failing over the weekend.
The real cost of poor data is clearest in the 2023 procurement plan. The economic analysis records that the Directorate of Immunization proposed 13,284,485 vials of routine childhood vaccines for 2023, assuming national stock on 31 December 2022 of 9,628,936 vials, so 3,665,550 vials would need to be bought. SMILE records showed stock on the same date of 12,207,138 vials, which put the additional need at only 1,077,347 vials. The report says the SMILE figure was reaffirmed by stock-taking at 8,000 Puskesmas (80% of the total), which recorded 7,830,350 non-expired vials remaining. The section we read does not explain how those two figures were reconciled, so we report them as written. A staff member of the Directorate of Pharmaceutical Services and Management is quoted by UNDP (February 2025) as saying SMILE stock data helped save over 100 billion rupiah in vaccine procurement budget. That saving is a quote, not an audited figure we have seen.
Director General of Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Rizka Andalusia (Ministry of Health release, 15 October 2024) adds the wider context: SATUSEHAT Logistics was born out of fragmented recording and reporting of medicines and medical devices, which made monitoring hard at both regional and national level. UNDP's 2025 document also mentions more than 400 digital health systems developed by central and local governments.
Constraints
- Geography and scale: a birth cohort of about 5 million a year across thousands of islands; SMILE is now used in 38 provinces and 514 districts and cities (UNDP)
- Temperature-sensitive products: vaccines are kept at 2–8°C; loggers send notifications when storage goes above 8°C or below 2°C (UNDP economic analysis)
- Manual monitoring used to happen only twice a day in office hours, while excursions can occur at night or at weekends because of blackouts, flooding or broken equipment
- Long-standing paper habits; UNDP notes reluctance at national and provincial level during early adoption, and the first scale-up to 25 districts and cities was slow
- End users are health workers with heavy workloads; UNDP reports that 80% of SMILE users are women, so training and support must reach remote facilities
- Uneven connectivity and infrastructure; the economic study drew on eight urban health centres with adequate facilities, so extrapolation needs care
- Must fit the national SATUSEHAT architecture and Decree HK.01.07/MENKES/1568/2024 rather than become yet another standalone app
- Donor and government funding (Gavi, the Government of Japan and others), with a need to prove economic value to secure further investment
Approach
Diagnose
This section is our reading of public documents, not a claim that MarkasDev was involved.
Diagnose in the SMILE case started by learning from a system already in use. UNDP Indonesia took Ministry of Health and UNDP staff on a study tour to India to look at eVIN: its planning, implementation, challenges and impact. Vidia Darmawi, SMILE Project Manager at UNDP Indonesia, is quoted as saying a study tour in the last quarter of 2022 gave the Ministry "the clearest concept of SMILE ecosystems that is not only about software but also involving hardware and human capacity".
The second step was standardising business processes before writing system requirements. In 2018 UNDP supported a needs assessment and then developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) for supply chain management down to the last mile. It was iterative: each step, actor, role and responsibility was validated with stakeholders. Augustian Proklamirsyah, IT System and Infrastructure Specialist at UNDP Indonesia, is quoted: "We don't want to work twice. It was important that we were firm on the business processes, then designed the requirements and solution around that."
For a pharmaceutical or distribution business, the equivalent questions are: where was stock last truly known, who records temperature and when, and which procurement decisions are being made on numbers nobody trusts. That mapping is what Diagnose is for, before anyone picks an application.
Deliver
This is also our analysis of public documents.
According to UNDP (February 2025), the first development phase in 2020 hired a local development team and built a cloud-based application and back-end database for the minimum viable product: inventory tracking, ordering, asset management, temperature monitoring and profiling. Pilots in Bogor and South Tangerang health centres were used to gather feedback on usability, design and functionality, which was relayed to the developers.
A second phase in early 2021, at the Ministry's direction, added COVID-19 features: GPS location, temperature monitoring and tracking, QR code scanning to identify vaccine vials, a training website, customised reporting, and API modules for interoperability with other systems. UNDP says SMILE was designed as an open-source solution so its code and resources could be reused for other programmes.
The hardware matters just as much. The 2021 annual report says SIM-enabled temperature loggers in the refrigerators send data to the SMILE server every 10 minutes. There were 86 units in 2018 and 714 in 2020; the economic analysis refers to 633 vaccine storages with loggers in its study; a UNDP blog from February 2024 says nearly 5,000 health facilities had installed loggers; UNDP's current project page cites more than 6,000 IoT loggers. SMS and email alarms go to provincial and district health offices for stock below the minimum threshold, stock-outs, expired vaccines, stock above the maximum, shipped orders and incident reports.
The Deliver pattern worth copying: ship the minimum functions to a few sites, add integrations and product identity (QR) once the process is stable, then connect sensors to a notification flow with a named recipient. For private organisations, this work usually rests on system integration & APIs and a lightweight field app, delivered by milestone through Deliver.
Operate
This is also our analysis of public documents.
The most underestimated part of SMILE is the size of the Operate effort. UNDP (February 2025) notes that the team started with four staff for two pilot districts and 54 facilities, then grew to 41 staff during the scale-up to 38 provinces: an infrastructure expert, data analysts, regional and provincial staff, help desk and administration. The help desk provides 24/7 phone support, plus WhatsApp groups per district for reminders, video tutorials and quick guides. Issues that provincial staff cannot solve go to the national team, and on to the developers if they turn out to be IT problems.
Training is layered: e-learning modules in a mobile app, technical guidelines, train-the-trainer sessions from UNDP to Ministry staff and then to health offices, and refresher training. District health officers use the analytics dashboard during supervision visits to check activity rates, data quality and vaccine refrigerator temperatures. Facilities that have been inactive for a while are flagged for follow-up training. Internal and external auditors are reported to use the SMILE transaction logbook as their audit worksheet.
Technical capacity was planned too. The 2021 annual report includes an infrastructure table: production servers at the Ministry of Health data centre on OpenShift, separate databases for OLTP, OLAP and CRON workloads, an IoT platform VM, and Kubernetes staging on cloud hosting. A 2021 load test is recorded at 2,000 concurrent users with a 99% success rate; the highest daily transaction count as of December 2021 was 110,130, with 33,997 registered users.
For organisations outside government, this is the part that usually goes missing from the budget: help desk, monitoring user activity, sensor maintenance and re-measuring impact. That is the scope of Operate.
High-level architecture
This flow is our simplification of the SMILE Annual Report 2021, UNDP's February 2025 case study and the Ministry/UNDP releases of 15 October 2024, not an audit of the production system. Server specifications in the 2021 report include planned capacity up to 2024, the current production configuration is not published in the sources we opened. The 10-minute interval and SIM-enabled loggers come from the 2021 annual report, the logger communication protocol is not detailed in public sources. A February 2024 UNDP blog mentions AI and big-data analytics without describing models or use, so we set the AI field to false for this entry.
Typical outcomes
The figures below are quoted as written in the sources we opened. Several UNDP pages are snapshots from different dates, so the numbers do not always match. We name the source on each line.
Pilot and stock-outs. UNDP's economic analysis (February 2024) says SMILE reduced vaccine stock-outs by 70% in the first six months after introduction; the pilot recorded 9,000 to 15,000 transactions from August 2018. Another UNDP project page (titled Sistem Monitoring Inventaris Logistik Kesehatan secara Elektronik) says medicine and vaccine stock-outs fell by 27% and overstocking by 31%.
Economic value. SMILE's 2021 investment was calculated at IDR 35,538,377,736: software enhancement IDR 5.59 billion, field workers and experts IDR 11.31 billion, software maintenance IDR 7.65 billion, public cloud hosting IDR 829 million, help desk IDR 504 million, IoT loggers IDR 2.80 billion, and capacity building and e-learning IDR 6.84 billion. Total savings were IDR 133,929,723,777, mostly from preventing unnecessary vaccine issuance (IDR 101.1 billion) plus staff time saved on temperature monitoring (IDR 18.2 billion) and report preparation (IDR 14.4 billion). The result was an ROI of 2.77 and a benefit-cost ratio of 3.77.
Cold chain. IoT loggers connected to SMILE were estimated to prevent potential losses from temperature excursions of up to IDR 457,152,196 (about US$32,000) per health centre per month. The report itself warns that this may be an overestimate because it assumes all vaccines stored in a day are degraded.
Scale in 2024–2026. Ministry of Health and UNDP releases, 15 October 2024: more than 800 million vaccine doses and 100 million medicine doses managed at 10,000 facilities in 38 provinces; together with UNDP and Gavi, the Ministry managed delivery of 450 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to at least 185 million people in a single year. UNDP's current project page: close to one billion vaccine and medicine doses tracked, including 127 million units of ARV, 52 million anti-TB medicines and 20 million anti-malaria medicines; more than 13,000 active facilities; nearly 30,000 active users a month generating around 1.1 million transactions; vaccine loss and inventory error of 0.1% for COVID-19 vaccines and 1.5% for routine immunization.
Beyond vaccines. ME-SMILE for medical waste uses QR-coded waste bags and digital scales; waste processing time fell from 3 hours to 30 minutes (UNDP, 2025). For rabies, 353,541 vaccine doses had been recorded in SMILE as of July 2024.
| Indicator | Figure | Source (date) |
|---|---|---|
| Vaccine stock-outs, first 6 months | down 70% | UNDP economic analysis (Feb 2024) |
| ROI / BCR | 2.77 / 3.77 | UNDP economic analysis (Feb 2024) |
| 2021 investment | IDR 35,538,377,736 | UNDP economic analysis (Feb 2024) |
| Reduction in data entry errors | 95% / 67% | UNDP case study (Feb 2025) / UNDP project page |
| Transactions per month | 0.9–1.2 million / ~1.1 million / >1.7 million | UNDP case study (Feb 2025) / two UNDP project pages |
| Temperature loggers | 714 (2020), ~5,000 facilities (Feb 2024), >6,000 | 2021 report / UNDP blog / UNDP project page |
| COVID-19 doses monitored | ~454 million at >12,000 facilities | UNDP case study (Feb 2025) |
Why this case matters for pharmacies, wholesalers and labs
A government vaccine cold chain is an extreme version of a problem many healthcare businesses face: high-value, temperature-sensitive products spread across many sites and recorded by people whose main job is not administration. SMILE shows the answer is not one clever app but a combination of SOPs, sensors, integration and a support team working over several years.
Sequence matters too: SMILE started with 54 facilities, grew slowly to 25 districts and cities, then took off when the pandemic created urgent demand. Private organisations rarely get a moment like that, so they need to build their own evidence of value through before-and-after measurement.
If your warehouse, branches or lab still rely on temperature logbooks and monthly stock recaps, start with Diagnose to map the blind spots, move on to system integration & APIs and field apps through Deliver, then keep adoption on track with Operate. More case studies in this sector are on the Pharmacy, distribution & labs page.
Sources
- Ministry of Health of the Republic of Indonesia, 15 October 2024. SATUSEHAT Logistik untuk Monitoring Distribusi Vaksin dan Obat-Obatan: https://kemkes.go.id/eng/satusehat-logistik-untuk-monitoring-distribusi-vaksin-dan-obat-obatan
- UNDP Indonesia, 15 October 2024. Transforming Indonesia's Medical Supply Chain: Ministry of Health Introducing SATUSEHAT Logistics: https://www.undp.org/indonesia/press-releases/transforming-indonesias-medical-supply-chain-ministry-health-introducing-satusehat-logistics-collaboration-undp-indonesia
- Disway, 17 October 2024. Menkes Budi Gunadi Sadikin Resmikan Platform SATUSEHAT Logistik: https://disway.id/read/829050/menkes-budi-gunadi-sadikin-resmikan-platform-satusehat-logistik-dukung-industri-kesehatan-digital
- UNDP Indonesia. SMILE (Electronic Health Logistics Inventory Monitoring System), project page: https://www.undp.org/indonesia/projects/smile-electronic-health-logistics-inventory-monitoring-system
- UNDP Indonesia. Sistem Monitoring Inventaris Logistik Kesehatan secara Elektronik (SMILE), project page: https://www.undp.org/indonesia/projects/sistem-monitoring-inventaris-logistik-kesehatan-secara-elektronik-smile
- UNDP Indonesia, 15 February 2024. Unveiling the Economic Value of SMILE: https://www.undp.org/indonesia/blog/unveiling-economic-value-smile-indonesias-digital-solution-vaccine-supply-chain-system
- UNDP Indonesia. The Economic Analysis of SMILE for Immunization Program (PDF report): https://www.undp.org/indonesia/publications/economic-analysis-smile-immunization-program
- UNDP Digital Health for Development Hub, February 2025. Success in Nationally Scaling a Supply Chain System in Indonesia (PDF): https://digitalhealthfordevelopment.undp.org/upload/documents/Success_in_Nationally_Scaling_a_Supply_Chain_System_in_Indonesia.pdf
- UNDP Indonesia. SMILE Annual Report 2021, Managing Immunization Supply Chain in Indonesia (PDF): https://undpngddlsprod01.blob.core.windows.net/pdc/GAVI%20Annual%20Report%202021_rev0707.pdf
Accessed on 15 October 2026 (WIB).