Optimus BT
Streamlining Business Relationship

Modern CRM systems assist in managing sales opportunities, but provide little visibility into other critical business relationships such as those with partners—including vendors, suppliers, and distributors. Though enterprise contract management (ECM) solutions have entered the business arena with the potential of forging stronger relationships with the entire spectrum of partners, contract management has remained an afterthought for most companies. Many organizations store contracts as documents in their SharePoint repository. Ram Prabhala, an ECM stalwart and the Principal and CEO of Optimus BT, notes that ECM helps in tracking all the different relationships both on the buy side and the sell side of contracts of the business and also the other type of legal agreements, which can have significant business implications. Optimus BT aims to help companies improve their business outcomes through their ECM software that is compatible with an array of collaboration platforms such as SharePoint and Office 365.

Founded by Microsoft technology experts, Optimus BT utilizes metadata and cloud-based NoSQL architecture for effective contract management. Optimus BT leverages Microsoft Azure and inbuilt XML-based, scalable workflow engine to power its ECM platform. eContracts—the contract lifecycle management software available on both Office 365 and SharePoint—is a part of Optimus’ ECM platform. In addition to retaining customer documents in the SharePoint infrastructure, eContracts enables tracking of contract management lifecycle from drafting to review process, and involves electronic signature capabilities for smooth workflow management. “Based on workflow templates for reviews, ad hoc workflows, and configuration screens as opposed to code—our ECM platform can be configured on the fly. It is more of a plug and play,” highlights Prabhala. The company also excels in bringing the contract lifecycle management process to SharePoint— in both on premise and cloud environments. The clients can manage contract lifecycle in the SharePoint environment without disrupting their current workflow. The company plans to augment its ECM prowess by allowing configuration of governance and workflow differently for sales and contracts using individual dashboards.

The ability to track the contract management lifecycle directly from clients’ SharePoint environment allows them to avoid engaging external vendors to track and manage contracts, which may potentially lead to privacy-related or other system compatibility issues. Optimus ensures that the robust security features of Microsoft SharePoint environment where the client has stored their contracts, remains undisturbed.

Based on workflow templates for reviews, ad hoc workflows, and configuration screens as opposed to code—our ECM platform can be configured on the fly

The value proposition provided by Optimus BT has won the attention of several legal teams at the enterprise level in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and financial sector companies. A large financial service management company that funded different projects of enterprises, faced challenges in managing its legalities. Visibility of the contractual relations and obligations held by the company with all its customers emerged as a major pain point, which intensified further as the company engaged with clients across the globe. As the company began to look for solutions, Optimus’ eContracts proved to be the best fit. Optimus put in place a contract management system that helped the client manage all contracts and legal entities through a single module. The contracts could be reviewed and optimized across different units for visibility.

With the aim to improve business relationship management through ECM, Optimus plans to increase investments in R&D to expand their product line. The company intends to leverage Artificial Intelligence to automatically bring contract data into the systems and implement analytics to enhance legal and document management capabilities. A contract analytics hub to integrate enterprise data into the contract management system for improving visualization around enterprise contracts and spend analytics is also on the Optimus’ itinerary.