Case Study

Canifa - Fashion Retail

Moving From a Costly, Rigid ERP to Odoo for Fashion Retail and Manufacturing in Vietnam

Industry: Fashion Retail and Manufacturing
Company Size: 1,000+ Employees
Users: 465+
Go-live: May 2017
Effort: 850+ man-days; dedicated team over 3 years
Modules: Point of Sale, Inventory, Accounting, CRM, Purchase, PLM, Sales, Manufacturing

About the Client

Canifa was founded in 1997 by Doan Hong Hai in Ha Dong as Canishop, a business unit of a company established in the Czech Republic, producing knitted textiles for export to Europe and some Asian markets. It entered the Vietnamese market in 2000 under the Canifa name, opened a 15,000 m² plant in Pho Noi A Industrial Park, Hung Yen, in 2002 with 1,200 machines and 1,000 workers, and launched Canifa Kids in 2007. In 2017, Canifa had 110 shops, more than 150 POS and 35,000 SKUs, and in 2025 it had 110 stores nationwide.

The Challenge

Separate Systems and Manual Processes

In its early years, Canifa ran several separate management systems alongside Excel and paper-based processes, which made data synchronization and process improvement increasingly difficult. Its POS also ran independently, its website ran on Magento, and there was no effective software for production management, so departments were not connected.

An ERP That Was Slow and Hard to Change

Canifa implemented SAP in 2015 to integrate warehouse, production and accounting. After a lengthy implementation, it did not deliver the expected results: stock management, profit optimization and system operations remained inefficient, and changes often took too long or could not be made at all, which made it hard to adapt to Vietnam's fast-moving market.

Running Costs That Became a Financial Burden

The biggest problem was the cost of maintaining SAP. With more than 1,000 employees, expenses grew quickly and became a major financial burden.

Why Odoo & Trobz

Looking for a better fit and lower running costs, Canifa worked with Trobz to move to Odoo. Trobz began with a consulting phase, bringing analysts and project managers together to build a clear implementation roadmap, and the project was carried out over six months under the leadership of Trobz CEO Tu Bui.

What We Built

Odoo Sales, Purchase, Inventory, Accounting, CRM, PLM and Manufacturing across retail and production
Point of Sale with a highly customized user interface
A custom promotion scheme and loyalty program
A multi-company setup for the retail company and the production company, with data created and synced automatically between them
VAS-compliant accounting reports
A follow-on system for product lifecycle and manufacturing management

Results

The system went live in phases from May 2017, and within a few weeks Canifa employees were using it and describing it as intuitive and efficient.
By 2018, the system was managing more than 35,000 SKUs and processing more than 30,000 transactions a day.