CAC Croit Co., Ltd. combines outstanding clinical research support (CRO) with information technology, driven by a single mission: getting safe, high-quality new drugs to patients as soon as possible. Its team of specialists provides comprehensive, multi-angled support across every kind of medical and pharmaceutical operation, including processing and classifying the vast volume of medical literature published every day.

Partnership overview

To semi-automate the knowledge-intensive task of processing and classifying medical documents, CAC Croit turned to VNEXT's AI development services and lab-based offshore development model. Working from VNEXT's AI development center in Hanoi, which specializes in natural language processing, a dedicated team delivered custom AI solutions for the client's exact text-processing needs, following an Agile approach with weekly meetings and real-time collaboration. Over the seven-month engagement, the team consistently turned even loosely defined requirements into working solutions within a week, laying the foundation for a long-term, win-win partnership.

Client testimonial

We had a chance to speak with Mr. Ando, who led this project, about how the company put VNEXT's offshore development services and AI solutions to work.

Q: What led your company to begin researching and developing AI?

Mr. Ando: One part of CAC Croit's CRO work involves our staff processing, classifying, and sorting the many medical and pharmaceutical papers and publications released every day. This work demands specialized knowledge and takes considerable time, since it means reading through long documents in detail. Internally, we had been discussing whether we could semi-automate it with AI, a topic drawing so much attention lately. As it happens, I studied natural language processing back in my university days, so I understood that this was achievable to a certain degree. I expected that applying AI to our operations would not only improve efficiency and contribute to profit, but also elevate the work CAC Croit does to the next level. With those internal expectations building, and with the trend of the times behind us, we decided to take on this AI project.

Q: What was the deciding factor in choosing VNEXT?

Mr. Ando: Last year, in May 2017, while visiting booths at an IT exhibition at Tokyo Big Sight, I happened to stop by VNEXT's booth. Right there, Mr. Son, VNEXT's president, introduced me to their lab-based offshore development model for AI and the results they had achieved. VNEXT runs an AI development center in Hanoi that covers natural language processing, which was exactly what our company was looking for. After a good deal of discussion, we found the depth of knowledge among VNEXT's AI development team and their reasonable, approachable cost to be genuinely appealing, and we signed a contract for lab-based offshore AI development.

Q: How did development proceed after the contract was signed?

Mr. Ando: We worked in an Agile fashion, holding regular weekly meetings and handing over requirements and requests at each one. Once the VNEXT team received a set of requirements, they seemed to talk things through internally before moving ahead with development.

Q: Communication is a challenge often raised in offshore development. In practice, were there moments where you felt cultural differences in how you communicated?

Mr. Ando: I did have some worry at first about whether what I said in Japanese would be properly understood, but around 90 percent of the time there were no issues at all. The requirement definitions, the problems, even the background context came across almost entirely. Looking at the finished product, I'm grateful that they clearly understood everything before delivering results. Lately, using cloud tools like Slack has made it convenient to communicate with the developers in Vietnam in real time. Culturally, things moved along smoothly with nothing that felt out of place. (Though I was surprised to learn that Vietnam celebrates the same Lunar New Year as China.) If I had to name one inconvenience, it would just be that the network was occasionally unstable.

Q: How would you rate VNEXT's AI work?

Mr. Ando: Seven months have passed since we signed the contract, and I think they've done an excellent job. Often, rather than giving detailed instructions or development requests, I would describe only a vague idea, something like "it would be nice if it could process this kind of text," and a week later they would have it completed exactly as I had pictured. Going forward, I would be very glad to keep producing results with VNEXT on our AI challenges and to build a win-win relationship between our companies at an early stage.

Mr. Ando, thank you very much for taking the time out of your busy schedule.

It is true that offshore development carries its share of challenges in distance, language, and culture. Understanding this, VNEXT has built its offshore development center around more than technical strength alone: our AI development services are backed by staff who understand communication in Japanese and colleagues with hands-on working experience in Japan, so that clients can entrust their projects with peace of mind. Above all, VNEXT sees what the client wants to do as what we want to do, delivering AI solutions as one team, from the very same perspective as our clients.

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About VNEXT HOLDINGS

Evolving from VNEXT SOFTWARE, founded in 2008, VNEXT HOLDINGS is a trusted AI-augmented software development and digital transformation (DX) partner. Headquartered in Vietnam with representative offices in Japan, our team of over 550 specialists has delivered more than 800 projects for over 400 clients across the Asian market, with expertise spanning custom web and app development, AI and ML, blockchain, enterprise system solutions, SAP ERP, legacy modernization, and offshore development.

Drawing on deep experience across manufacturing, retail, healthcare, finance and fintech, logistics, and education, we apply globally recognized standards to help enterprises modernize, scale, and compete with confidence. Committed to supporting businesses at every stage of their DX journey, VNEXT HOLDINGS combines AI-powered services and solutions with an AI-augmented workforce to deliver greater speed, scalability, and quality.