HCM City (VNS/VNA) – As one of the most-developing areas in Vietnam,HCM City is faced with both opportunities and challenges to make the best useof the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).
Facing a storm of technological advancement, many state agencies and businesseslocated in the southern hub have taken steps to use advanced technologies toimprove their performances and product quality.
The Japanese-invested Juki Vietnam Co Ltd in 2016 decided to purchase two robotarms for nearly 200,000 USD for processing work.
It was among the first companies in Vietnam to use robotic technology toimprove the quality of its products.
The robot arms have helped reduce the number of workers at the processingdivision from 12 to only one, and that person only has to monitor the robot’sfunction.
According to Juki Vietnam CEO Dao Quoc Cuong, the company would buy modernequipment as it targets to raise productivity by 1 percent every month toattract new orders.
Limo Group JSC, located in HCM City’s Hoc Mon district, has also invested innew technologies, machinery, facilities and human resources.
According to general director Huynh Tan Loc, Limo Group was now able to connectsuppliers, factories and customers, saving a lot of time, cost and efforts forthe three sides.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is also another update for companies in Vietnam.It is seen as the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and has beenwell-received by many businesses.
They include VinEco, the agricultural arm of property and retail conglomerateVinGroup, the Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank(Techcombank), military telecom group Viettel, and the southern-basedelectronic and digital retailer Nguyen Kim.
According to Social Media Command Center, a company that has transferred AIapps to Vietnamese businesses, the demand for AI applications is on the riseamong HCM City-based companies as it is considered the future along with bigdata and blockchain.
The same trend has also been seen among the city’s state agencies.
Binh Dan Hospital in late 2016 was the first agency in the healthsector to use robots in surgery. Director Tran Vinh Hung said robotic surgeonshad improved the quality of the hospital, and the trend has been followed by ChoRay Hospital.
The Preventive Medicine Centre of HCM City has used a geographic informationsystem (GIS) to monitor and care for patients infected by viral hemorrhagicfevers.
The use of GIS has helped the centre keep track on how the disease is spreadingthrough the city and provide infected areas with plans to deal with theproblems.
Tourism is another field that has been luring investment in new smart technologies.
The HCM City Department of Tourism has recently deployed an application to helpvisitors find information related to their trips such as restaurants, hotelsand transportation, as well as emergency request information.
The department is also considering the implementation of a virtual tourismprogramme that provides suggestions for tourists and allows them to accessphotos, videos, clips and information about the city’s most popular venues.
But a major problem for both state agencies and private businesses is findingemployees to operate and monitor those technologies and make the best use ofthem.
USM Healthcare Medical Devices Factory JSC is a typical case that has found ithard to source high-quality human resources.
“We have not been able to find anyone who meets our requirements in this sectorbecause our technologies are made in Germany and Switzerland, making them quitespecific,” said Vo Xuan Boi Lam, the company’s director.
To operate the machines, USM Healthcare had to send 10 engineers to Germany forspecial training, costing the firm a lot of time and money. It sometimes has toinvite foreign specialists to train its employees on site.
A similar case is Minh Nguyen Industrial Support JSC. It had to look for 400qualified workers as required by Samsung after the two sides reached anagreement in December 2016.
The company’s general director Chau Ba Long said looking for high-qualityemployees was one of the most difficult tasks for the firm when it cooperatedwith big companies.
“We had to hire foreign specialists, overseas Vietnamese and distinguishedgraduates of universities, colleges and vocational schools to meet Samsung’srequest,” Long said.
According to the Saigon High-Tech Park Training Centre, companies arechallenged by the fact that the quality of domestic labourers, including schoolgraduates, did not meet their standards.
There are now more than 300,000 enterprises in HCM City and the number isforecast to reach 500,000 in 2020, raising the demand for high-quality labourrapidly.
A recent study by ManpowerGroup, the world’s leading personnel serviceprovider, showed 45 percent of companies in the world were having problemsemploying high-quality staff.
Vietnam is no exception to the trend. The demand for high-quality labour hasgrown at least 20 percent per year in the last three years, but the locallabour supply cannot meet the demand.
A number of companies are looking for highly-skilled employees to work onurgent projects, but they have to spend too much time and money sourcing staff.
According to analysts, this had affected companies’ plans and limited theirgrowth.
The human aspect remained important as people were the “software” that operatedand monitor technologies that only served as hardware to the whole machine,Professor Ho Tu Bao, director of the John von Neumann Institute at HCM CityNational University, said.
“We need to develop a strong base of human resources to use technologies andturn them into valuable, helpful products or they will just stay the sameforever,” he said.
But what was more necessary was improving education and training programmes tomeet the demands of companies that were using modern technologies, he said.
“In the trend of AI application, Vietnam is lacking qualified technicians,especially those who work in the IT sector,” said Tran Nguyen Vu, IBM Vietnam’sdirector of software solutions.
Large-cap companies often chose to train their own employees to use AIapplications while small firms had to purchase self-operating technologies tosave on expenses, Vu said.
According to Nguyen XuanThuy, MTEX Vietnam’s general management director, local companies should startworking on the purchase and development of modern technologies while findingsources of high-quality labourers to run them.
Some local companies had reached outside the country for technicians ortraining for their employees. At the same time, a number of universities in thecity had worked with local firms to train students.
Starting in Vietnam in1997, MTEX Vietnam Co Ltd found it difficult to design its integrated circuit(IC) semiconductor products when no local universities had their own facultiesfor circuit design and development.
The company decided to work with local schools to open new departments oncircuit design and development. Thuy said that the company employed graduatesfrom those departments after they finished school and then continued to trainthem at work.
MTEX Vietnam had trained more than 850 technicians since then and become thekey IC development centre for the group, he said.
Local companies needed to co-operate with schools to introduce high-skilledlabourers and new technologies because there was a big gap between therequirements of businesses and the actual competency of graduates, Kieu Huynh Son,Vice Chairman of the HCM City Association of Mechanical-Electrical Enterprise,said.
“Our association members hope local schools and institutes see each business asa research subject, a customer and a partner that travel alongside them on thepath of innovation,” Son said.
Nguyen Ky Phung, Deputy Director of the HCM City Department of Science andTechnology, said that some challenges remained before schools and enterprisescould work with each other.
There were no specific policies or incentives for both sides to work togetherregarding finance and tax, he said, adding that schools did not regard cooperationwith businesses as a strategic goal.
According to economists, the State must become a link between schools andbusinesses by sharing risks and providing incentives.
Local schools must be more active and work with businesses to improve thequality of students – which was considered the most important aspect ofimproving business competitiveness in Industry 4.0.
Do Van Dung, Principal ofHCM City University of Technology and Education, said Vietnamese schools mustrenovate their teaching and educational methods.
Teachers should become mentors so that the education sector can watch changesin the demands of the labour market and resolve businesses’ problems with humanresources.-VNS/VNA