Since Vietnam became an official member of WTO in 2006, enterprises need to pay attention and invest in their management capacities in order to build robust strategies and improve their competitive advantage. The application of self-assessment (SA), an advanced management tool, based on a business excellence model (BEM) has been recognised as improving organisational performance by providing a referenced framework and a common language to direct organisations’ focus on improvement and to assist them to deliver both financial and nonfinancial performance enhancement. This study focuses on the investigation of BEM-based selfassessment experiences of two Vietnamese enterprises. The two case study companies, both in the garment and textile industry, undertook SA using a simple EFQM questionnaire tool. Subsequently, this study used semi-structured interviews with senior managers in order to gather data evaluating the benefits of SA to the companies and to identify factors influencing the success of the implementations. Template analysis and Nvivo software were used for the data analysis.\ud
\ud
Findings provide several insights into how SA outcomes benefit Vietnamese enterprises. Firstly, out of six intended benefits of this SA tool identified in the literature, managers strongly confirmed only one — the benefit of helping them to identify their current position and to determine future directions and priorities — as being useful in improving company performance. Two additional benefits were confirmed relating to the use of SA in identifying the company’s strengths and weaknesses and in enhancing organisational learning and awareness.\ud
\ud
In relation to factors influencing the success of implementation, several were identified as being crucial: a lack of scorer understanding of SA and BEM knowledge; a risk of emphasis on high scores; and the unique ‘encouraging scoring’ style in Vietnam. Significantly, training was regarded as crucial in overcoming these difficulties, and was as important to managers as top level commitment for successful SA. The research confirms that SA is useful for Vietnamese companies in enabling benefits which should enhance performance. However, training is crucial in overcoming implementation issues which may impact on success. Whilst benchmarking is normally closely associated with SA and BEM, it had limited relevance in the case companies due to the prevalence of high-scoring, which limited the usefulness of comparisons, and the current low levels of comparative data available in Vietnam