Foreign enterprises’ logistics activities in Vietnam

Foreign enterprises’ logistics activities in Vietnam

Transport: foreign enterprises have currently been using outsourcing services provided by international forwarding agencies. Although average costs are relatively high, the service quality is stable. Normally they are large exporters, they have good relationship to shipping companies they frequently use services from.

Storing, reservation: warehousing system is arranged in accordance to storing plans which facilitate enterprises in managingtheir inventory and providing materials for production process. Besides, dealing with incidents of natural disasters which normally happen at the end of years, enterprises have had plans to reserve material that ensure their continuous productions.

Repair and preparation: Spare parts are ready for important machines. Enterprises normally use life-time maintenance packages provided by manufacturers to ensure incidents will be recovered in 48 hours. The signing of these maintenance contracts help enterprise leaders have good managements of spare parts for their highcost machines.

Human resource and training: with exclusive management human resource abroad, these enterprises deploy a tight management system with target-management tools. Training tasks have been paid attention to by proper working processes that are not only suitable to working environments in Vietnam but also ensuring its professional operations in enterprises’ global systems.

Technical documents: users’ manuals and enterprises’ machine history are kept by maintenance department to ensure information access when there are incidents. Besides, technicaldocuments on production information are used to support purchasing department in finding proper things for their production.

Assisting inspection devices: Enterprises’ inspection devices are taken care by maintenance engineers to ensure smooth operation of production machine system, warehouse system, and trucks. Local maintenance staff handles simple devices and machines; maintenance staff from manufacturers handles costly complicated ones.

Information control chart by Donald J.Bowersox

Lessons for vietnam’s enterprises

On meeting on time the needs for supply and production

Establishing production coordinate department to arrange orders in accordance to material preparation.

Carrying out statistics on annual material using to predict production situation for the next phase. With materials imported from foreign countries, it is necessary to find trusted agencies for import. Material quality is an important factor for input stage of production process. And purchasing materials should meet 3 requirements: right materials, right price and right time.

With export orders, there should be proper arrangement to minimize damage in transportation process and to ensure enterprises’ goods not to be compiled with other goods when they are handed to forwarding agencies.

If enterprises are able to carry out schedule registering instead of forwarding agencies, they can control the time to deliver goods to ports and it is possible to cut costs.

Saving logistics operation costs

It is necessary to make a good choice of partners handling international forwarding that meet specific requirements. Besides costs, schedule registering is also important because the schedule will be a vital factor in case that imported goods is urgent ones.

Minimizing unnecessary deriving costs in logistics activities as storing costs and promoting receiving costs in different forms. Enterprises should acknowledge relevant costs that correspond to each activity in a logistics process chain.

Controlling information channels

With information relevant to many departments. Each department should provide records when they are required to ensure they have completed their own tasks. For example, when goods is transported to warehouse by the third party, there should be a record to show the delivered amount corresponding with that on document or the quality control department should give out a quality control record to show the goods is qualified for storage… These records should be fully collected before payment.

In information protection, Microsoft Outlook is a good choice for small, medium sized enterprises instead of building an internal email system. Moreover, protection against cyber-attacks should be relied on individual attempts. They should have a check on partners’ email when carrying out transaction.