The biggest issues to outsource the Catering Service Development in Vietnam are “design” and “QA (quality assurance)”.

When it comes to design, the key is always to understand what a client wants and propose “how” that is expressed through a great creativity. This process did not go well in my development case. Although I have received many design proposals or see their portfolios, they tend to lack in the creativity and consistency. They try to pick up the trends from US and Europe but the proposals are not as inspirational. Although they make the best efforts, Vietnam may not be in the best environment for them as there are few designs of inspirations in city. The number of good industrial designs, interiors and arts are still very small. Also I came to think that Vietnamese characters may be one of the issues as they are not easily fit for the good designs. For the initial launch, we asked the experienced Japanese designer to share the design directions, so that local chef Ex. use it as a good reference. Also I was able to hire good designers who could make our service better and better. The future is positive.

The other issue is QA. It is hard to admit but our launch was delayed for 2 months because of QA process. We found out that many features came out to be implemented differently from our expectations. The fix process was worse. We went though the fixes of the same issues again and again as it leads to other issues and we seem them degraded several times. I have to admit that my project management process was not good enough and my requirements were not clear enough. I expected some of the details will be fixed through the detail discussions with the chefs but this is a over-expectation.

These are the problems as Vietnam is the place to be used as the off-shore still, not the one as market. They are good at what is written clearly in RFQ but are not used to use their creativity to read between the lines to improve. It has to be the responsibility of the service owner side to have the clear picture of what they want to ask into detail. I came to know later that Japanese off-shore companies tend to have a quite good documentations, or create the mixed team of Japanese and Vietnamese to outsource the routine parts to Vietnamese. Also, most of the cases they hire bridge system btw Chef Executives and FnB Team for the transparent communications. It is my mistake that I expect the same things will be received with the lower costs. I should have thought about how to make up what would have been short.

Having all said, Vietnam is the attractive place for the system development. The keys to the success are 3 things – (1) Service owner to have a clear picture of the service into detail (2) Seize the skills and experiences of the team, and find the alternative resources to fill the weak points (3) Share Information with transparency among the team including each Chefs and Staffs in FnB team. These are the issues that I need to improve for our team.

Butler Caterers will improve our process to provide the best service with good Vietnamese Chef Head and FnB team. When we make this, we will win.