The Austrian market leader on the fast track

Austria Bio Garantie (ABG), founded in 1993, was Austria’s first certification body for organic agriculture and processing. ABG now inspects and certifies more than 11,800 clients, and has approximately 40 employees and 100 inspectors. It maintains two offices and is embedded in a network of international partner organisations.
 

Requirements

ABG was co-developer of Ecert and contributed much practical knowledge towards its development. The reason for its interest in Ecert was that ABG wanted to strengthen its market position in Austria while also entering new markets. To maintain a high quality service ABG realised it was necessary to have a powerful database system where data is only entered once and is readily exchanged between several partner organisations. Such a database needs to cover all stages of the inspection and certification workflow, the whole correspondence and data archiving and have an automated invoicing functionality.

Realisation

In addition to the electronic management of clients’ field, crop, livestock and product data, all correspondence and document archiving is conducted by Ecert.

The inspection and certification workflow is managed completely in Ecert, including the issuing of certificates. With Ecert internal processes are evaluated and optimised. Certificates can also be downloaded or checked by third parties from ABG‘s website. This improved the service ABG offered to its clients and consequently increased their loyalty.

An extra innovative function of Ecert is a feature that sends out automatic messages to pre-defined users informing them about changes in the certification status of business partners.

Austria Bio Garantie also handles the complete invoicing process with Ecert. Several data interfaces allow data exchange with partner organisations, saving time and avoiding data entering errors enormously.

Hans Matzenberger, Managing Director, Austria Bio Garantie
“Austria Bio Garantie is currently undergoing a period of growth. It is therefore very important for us to work with a software system that allows us to exchange data with our partners. Today we benefit from synergies and can access new markets easier and more efficiently.“