From field to cup: How SONNENTOR digitalized its entire value chain with fabular

Who is SONNENTOR?

SONNENTOR is an Austrian company based in Sprögnitz in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria. It produces organic herbs, teas and spices and sells them in around 60 countries. The company works closely with its contract farmers and places strong emphasis on the common good, renewable energy and sustainable raw materials.

Why was the previous solution no longer enough?

Before fabular, SONNENTOR relied on an Access-based solution. As the company grew, it reached its limits, mainly in three areas.

B2C scalability. Every additional order meant additional manual work: entering, checking, forwarding, reporting. Yet whether 100 or 1,000 orders came in should not make a major difference in effort.

System silos. Separate systems made it hard to share information between departments. Data had to be transferred several times.

Reporting. KPIs were compiled by hand. Every analysis started with merging several Excel spreadsheets, so decisions were often based on figures that were already out of date.

How does SONNENTOR digitalize its value chain?

With fabular, SONNENTOR introduced an integrated platform that covers the entire value chain. For a company whose core promise is traceability, this is not a nice-to-have but a fundamental prerequisite. That was the deciding factor back in 2004.

Activity Flows automate business processes. Activity Flows are individually configurable workflows in fabular. They guide a transaction through the process step by step, without anyone having to intervene. In B2C, with large numbers of small, standardized orders, this means orders are processed straight through.

Interfaces handle external communication. fabular now takes care of VAT ID verification via FinanzOnline, the Austrian tax authority's online portal, notifying the freight forwarder and completing forms, fully automatically in the background.

A mobile dashboard delivers KPIs in real time. Management can access year-over-year revenue figures live on their smartphones.

fabAI adds artificial intelligence to the platform. It is used to automatically optimize forecasts and processes and to identify improvement potential at an early stage.

What results has SONNENTOR achieved?

Growth without proportional headcount growth

SONNENTOR pursues a digitalization approach that is far from standard in the industry. The goal is not to cut jobs. It is to enable growth without the organization having to scale at the same rate.

From up to 10 minutes to zero manual effort per transaction

Verifying a VAT ID, emailing the freight forwarder, completing a form: these steps used to take up to 10 minutes per transaction. Today they run automatically. Whether 100 or 1,000 orders come in per day no longer makes a difference in manual effort.

One dashboard instead of 17 Excel spreadsheets

More than 20 years of business data were already stored in fabular but hardly ever analyzed. With the new BI dashboards, live KPIs replace the 17 Excel spreadsheets that previously had to be consolidated by hand.

More room for value-adding work

Anyone who spends their day printing reports and switching between systems has no capacity left to improve processes. fabular relieves employees of this routine work. For Thomas Koppensteiner, employee satisfaction is just as important as efficiency.

An investment that pays off

Over the entire lifecycle, the savings in manual effort, the avoided cost of errors and the growth achieved significantly outweigh the investment. Instead of flowing into stopgap solutions, the budget actively works for the business.

What makes a software partnership last for 20 years?

SONNENTOR and fab4minds have been working together since 2004. Today, the collaboration includes weekly alignment meetings, regular on-site visits, direct access to developers and a ticketing system for structured requests. SONNENTOR values five things in particular:

1. One system for the entire value chain – no manual handoffs between systems, no system changes.
2. Existing customers benefit too. New modules and solutions that fab4minds develops with other customers flow back to the existing customer base.
3. Reliability. A partner that will still be there in five or ten years.
4. Short lines of communication. Whoever picks up the phone at fab4minds knows SONNENTOR's processes.
5. No forced migrations. fabular evolves continuously alongside the business instead of requiring an expensive re-implementation every few years.

Browse the success story

Prefer to read offline? Download the success story (PDF) · Deutsche Version (PDF)

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