Localization in alignment with Vietnam industrialization goals

Yeon In Jung Chief Executive Officer & General Director Doosan Heavy Industries Vietnam

The upgrades are in relation to the “cultivation of talent” among the company’s nearly 2,500 Vietnamese employees. Jung said, “Our philosophy is that as our employees grow, so shall the company grow, so we are redoubling our efforts and focus on the organic development of staff and that is especially true in relation to our 437 Vietnamese engineers that now work at the company.” Some of the specific actions they are taking to enhance their training programs are: working with universities here and abroad, creating advanced educational opportunities, holding continuous training programs at the company’s dedicated training center, bringing in experts from other countries and contracting with Vietnams best, brightest and most dynamic trainers to hold in-house seminars.These are all in addition to the transfer of technology that is happening all over the 110 hectare complex in Vietnams’ central province of Quang Ngai.

Every year they have moved closer and closer to realizing their engineer development and technology transfer strategies that are really two sides of the same coin. To begin operations they have invested US$300 million to acquire the land, build the complex and equip it with themost technically advanced machinery in heavy industry.

Today with 642 Vietnamese managers, technicians and engineers the company’s localization strategy and investment in Vietnamese employees is well along and certainly producing favorable results.

A spokesman from HR said, “As the Vietnamese matured professionally we’ve promoted them, given them ever greater responsibility and are now training them for even bigger challenges, they are our future leaders and the ones who will take Doosan Vina to the next phase of development, when we came here that was the plan and as you can see we’ve held the course and Vietnamese now account for 98 percent of our workforce.”

The other side of the localization coin involves the fact that they brought the most advanced technology available in the world of heavy industry to Vietnam, several of the massive machines at the complex cost well over a million dollars each, and once such a machine is here, they needed to train people to operate it since these machines were the first of their kind in Vietnam.

The newest strategy for localization is an external initiative that will involve working with local Vietnamese companies to offer a “Brother” program where they will find companies that can benefit from being associated with a global organization and gain useful experience.

Ngo Thanh Ca, head of the Training Center said, “We’re really proud of the development of our local employees, learning to be a highly skilled welder, engineer or technician in heavy industry is not an easy journey. The products we make are essentially custom made to a specific design to fit or meet specific needs; it’s not assembly line work. For example to be able to weld with the precision needed to manufacture a five-story-tall high-pressure supercritical boiler that operates under extreme high pressure, one has to be an exceptionally skilled inpidual. Today our Vietnamese welders and engineers are some of the world’s finest and most skilled professionals or craftsmen to be found anywhere in the world. And incidentally the products made by our Vietnamese staff are now hard at work in 27 countries around the world producing power, water, chemicals, as well as loading and unloading cargo ships at ports worldwide.”

One of the company’s slogans is “Made in Vietnam, My Country, My Products, My Pride.” The staff at Doosan Vina believes in their country, their workmanship and they want the world to know that Vietnam has arrived and is meeting the challenges of the global market and winning.

CEO Jung concluded his comments on localization by explaining the process the company used to select their strategies, “We selected these strategies because they align with the plans of Vietnam’s leadership and accomplish several things: One, the company develops; Two, the staff develop and; Three, as Vietnam develops there will be a sustainable industrial base that has grown in tandem with the country that can and will be able to support the nation’s development of mechanical engineering and its heavy industry sector.

Dang Hien