UMA – Transforming the largest furniture retail chain in Vietnam

About UMA

UMA (later renamed as Baya), a company founded by a Swedish ex-IKEA executive, and started operating in Vietnam in 2006. It is one of the largest furniture and interior decoration retailers in Vietnam.

Some figures about UMA:

• 10 shops nationwide + 1 online shop

• 130 users 6,000 SKUs

• Up to 100,000 items sold per month

• 350+ employees

The early days

Not so long after its launch in 2007, UMA started with a small ERP. However, not long after that, the platform was unable to perform what the company wanted, and thus quickly failed to keep up with the fast growth of the company. This platform was made obsolete by the difficulty to extend with additional features (online sales, product management, promotion scheme, and loyalty program, etc.)

The issues were not only the platform's features but also the lack of transparency in handling software related issues. Bug fixes were delivered, and changes could be made as requested, but UMA had no idea what had been changed inside. There was no way to UMA to track back what had been done, and what the company needed to improve to avoid reoccurring problems. Everything quickly became a real mess: UMA completely lost control of the platform.

The Odoo project implemented by Trobz 

Through a suggestion from a French friend, Mrs. Ulli Wingårdh, one of the two founders of UMA, met Trobz, which was among the first Odoo integrators in Vietnam at that time, and the collaboration has started since then.

The Odoo ERP project between UMA and Trobz was divided into 3 phases:

• Phase 1: Missing parts in the old system (product management, integration with the online shop).

• Phase 2: Full supply chain (for replacement of the old POS system): POS, stock management (multi-warehouses), purchasing, replenishment, invoicing, payments,...

• Phase 3: Back office: human resources (payroll, integration with a fingerprint attendance machine).

• Phase 4: E-commerce front-end (based on Magento).

Main features and customizations 

• Full integration with the online shop (Magento-based)

• Sophisticated custom promotion scheme and loyalty program

• Implementation of a sophisticated replenishment algorithm to optimize the supply chain

• High level of customization and fine-tuning of all the native Odoo modules

What the customer said

In the below video, the founder of UMA shared the whole stories about how her journey with Odoo began and the collaboration with Trobz.