When Thang Ha first joined Dedicated Services in Vietnam 15 years ago, he little thought that today he’d be the General Manager for the commercial arm of Dedicated Services. He told us a little more about his experience and what the Commercial Dedicated Services team has to offer ….
When I started, I was the fifth employee – so its fair to say I’ve been involved in the business from the start, today we have over 2,000 employees, so it’s been quite a journey! I still have photos of our first building to remind us how far we’ve come!
We have built some great experience in the residential sector and our goal now is to replicate that in the commercial area – whether its apartment blocks, restaurants or workshops through to factories, libraries or office buildings.
That means looking at how we can bring MiTek’s global expertise into play, for example with its knowledge of the steel sector – the residential sector is all about bricks and timber but for commercial, the scale and requirements are obviously different.
Demand for accurate estimating and topnotch software skillset
We wanted to reinvent ourselves – introduce our skills in drafting, estimating, 3D modeling, computer-aided structural engineering and adapt these to different materials and buildings. There’s currently real interest in our drafting services in the market-leading software i.e Inventor, Solidworks, Revit and Tekla and this is where the lion’s share of our work lies.
We can offer customers a variety of services to help with their projects, including 3D drawing and virtual reality. Some of our clients are using Tekla, they want us to draw up the steel structures or convert their whole library from other software platforms to Tekla, we can do that.
Some other customers want us to set up Revit’s enviroment/template, create 3D model with the coordination to all Engineering & Architect drawings, and then do the estimating and checking of the structure design. We can do that as well.
The great thing about using Dedicated Services is that we can be whatever the client needs – whether it be engineering, architecture or software related. And we make sure each customer has their own dedicated team so members know exactly what that customer is seeking to achieve, and what matters to them.
Enabling your vision
We like to think we can really make a difference. It’s not just about saying we’ve got the software, it’s just a tool. It’s about taking your ideas and project vision: you name it, we master it!
Given that some of these projects can run for two-three years, this kind of consistency and continuity is really important for clients and takes away the challenges of them having to resource-up with different skills for different stages of the work. With Dedicated Services, you can just come to us and tell us what you need, what the issue is, and we can sort it.
The amount of detail and support we can provide is entirely in the client’s hands. You want architectural drawings to bring your concept to life? We can do that. We can provide shop drawings and production drawing as well. You want MEP drawings? Easy, we can do this, too.
While we’re headquartered in Vietnam, we’ve a wide customer base, mainly in Australia and North America and Europe. Because our teams are skilled and agile when it comes to learning, it doesn’t matter which software or systems the clients are using – we can work with these, learn from the customer and deliver exactly what they need for their own geographical region.
The knowledge we glean stays with us and is documented – again, great for consistency as even if we have personnel changes within our team, the know-how stays.
We recently undertook the structure design and drawing work for MiTek in the US’s latest modular offsite project, this was a fantastic project to be part of and the new modular buildings are set to play a leading role in the future of US homebuilding.
Our Commercial team is working closely with the MiTek Global subsidiary, which we call the internal team, and we are proud that our Vietnam team provides great support and a strong back-office to help our MiTek Global team grow stronger.
There’s strong collaboration across each team, with lots of opportunities to test ideas and ask, does this work? What happens if we try this? Lots of sharing of knowledge and a chance for everyone to play an important part in delivering the best for our customers. We are confident that we can provide great services to the external customers.
I think this way of working is great as it’s a way of keeping our teams working on exciting projects
