ELCA VIETNAM: Getting great benefits from Vietnam-Switzerland long-lasting & stable relationship
The success of a company depends on the owner, the management team and committed employees. But without a stable political environment, success would be very difficult indeed - especially if the company is active in a foreign country.
When the Swiss head of ELCA Vietnam, Jean-Paul Tschumi, landed in Ho Chi Minh City early in 1998, he had a mandate to create an offshore operation for ELCA. Starting with six people ELCA’s outsourcing and offshoring model is now mature and has grown into a successful production facility with over 200 employees. We have many long-term employees - in fact, the first person we employed still works for us! Next to business skills, one reason for the success of ELCA Vietnam is the affiliation with a successful group. Since 1998, ELCA has tripled its workforce to over 750 employees from more than 30 countries. Another reason is the stable and trusting relationship between Vietnam and Switzerland, which allows us to simply focus on software development and implementation. This was very important for us, as ELCA was one of the first Swiss companies building up an offshore center in Vietnam. Today, we are a key employer for IT engineers in Ho Chi Minh City.
Most of our engineers come from top Vietnamese universities, with whom we maintain close working relationships. Every day we receive a good number of applications from future graduates who are interested in pursuing their career in software development at ELCA. Why? We invest in our young employees in Vietnam, training them and giving them opportunities to develop top-quality professional experience and know-how. Further, to encourage engineers to build a solid career basis, we allow them to work 80% if they want to do a post-graduate degree in Vietnam.
Our overall goal in external relationships is to establish long and healthy connections with our partners and clients. Internally, our focus is on nurturing a creative, high-quality, friendly and flexible working atmosphere that allows employees to move between several technologies, clients and services within ELCA’s broad portfolio.
Since the beginning of business in Vietnam, ELCA’s main objective has been to promote and support knowledge exchange and intercultural communication between Vietnamese and Swiss employees - and not only in our own company. In 2008, the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCM-UT) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) signed a cooperation agreement to contribute to sustained and stable socio-economic development in Vietnam. Swiss government scholarships have supported Vietnamese students at doctoral level, as well as student exchange programs (some jointly financed by the EPFL and ELCA) and professor’s visits from both sides.
ELCA Vietnam has a strong corporate culture based on agile project management, technical expertise and highest levels of quality, following ISO 9001 and CMMI best practices. We believe in collaborative working (it brings first-class results and mutual success), in independence (the result is all that counts and our only responsibility is to delight our customers), in commitment (working as a team, sharing experience and knowledge helps us deliver excellent solutions), in trust (to build long-term relationships) and in passion (for innovation and technical perfection that creates added value and provides competitive advantage).
Frequent travel to and from Switzerland enables our teams to deliver highly rated solutions with regard to quality, schedule and cost constraints. This leads to a very high level of satisfaction - for our customers, our employees and the company.
IT, in all of its aspects has gradually become the nerve center of modern societies. IT enables developing countries to become part of the industrialized world, enables individuals to access services they never had the chance to encounter before like financial inclusion, and enables companies to bring the best teams together - no matter where they are located. More than a technology, IT is an enabler for each society. IT supports the integration and stability of the world - and ELCA Vietnam is part of that global process. We thank Switzerland and Vietnam for always supporting our way, for helping us “make it work”, and congratulate Vietnam and Switzerland on 45 years of trustful and stable relations. We’re looking forward to more of the same in the future.
PV
Vietnamese
