Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Axicos was founded in 2007 by senior executives with extensive experience in the pharmaceutical, diagnostic, and IT solutions. The company has a wholly-owned subsidiary in Ludwigshafen, Germany. It also has a network of independent legal tech consultants that can support its customers if they wish.
Carizma First-the Signature Product
The company has developed a suite of easy to use, practice-proven software products, including Carizma First for automated document creation, Carizma for full contract life-cycle management, and Carizma QM for management of regulated documents such as SOPs. Carizma is in use in over 50 countries worldwide.
Carizma First enables non-experienced users to create high quality, compliant documents, easily and quickly, while leaving the responsible department in full control.
Carizma First can be used as a stand-alone system or as a seamlessly integrated add-on to Carizma.
Carizma is an easy to use software system that manages the entire contract life-cycle – from first negotiations all the way to contract expiry many years later.
It facilitates the collection and provision of relevant information and documents, supports the collaboration among different users and monitors due dates, contractual obligations, and risks.
Contracts can be signed using eSignature, based on DocuSign or FP Sign.
The Charismatic Duo
Bernd Kottke and Barbara Staehelin are the Co-founders of Axicos and have been working together for over 10 years. To be more precise, Bernd Kottke holds the position of CEO and Barbara Staehelin is the Chairman of the company.
Based on their experience in the industry, the duo decided to develop a software that tames the complexity of managing B2B contracts in organizations. They knew that it was important to put the user front and foremost. Too many enterprise systems are too time-demanding, too complex and too expensive. Both the leaders wanted to build software that would quickly help users do their job better, not just improve control by their managers.
Early on, the leadership decided to grow the company organically, avoiding the risk of overselling to meet short-term demands by external investors.
Beneficial Products and Solution
Establishing and managing B2B contracts often involve many different parties – in- and outside the company. This can be a complex, even frustrating process. There is value in accelerating the administration of this process, so the contracting parties can concentrate on what matters most to them: the content of the deal.
When the contract is freshly signed, the involved parties are mostly clear on what is expected from them. But as time goes by, this institutional knowledge is easily lost. Team members change on both sides. And suddenly, it becomes necessary to prove that you’ve been compliant with the contract … if you are reading this, you probably have suffered the consequences of such a situation: it is a huge and painful process to re-gain trust with a B2B partner after such a crisis. The only way to avoid such crises is by taming the complexity of contract management.
Obstacles and Preventive Strategies
Axicos is a self-funded company and they are growing at a rapid pace. “We are interested in finding more “smart” resellers – people who offer consulting services to our clients to help them establish new processes. They do that on their own account and our role is limited to that of software vendor”, Barbara Staehelin, the Chairman of the company asserts. Further, she says, “We used to have a problem addressing the needs of smaller companies without own IT departments. Recently we’ve invested in making our software available in Microsoft’s Azure SaaS store. We are proud to be one of the first such companies to be represented there – the cloud-based service makes it easier for us to expand our client base.”
The Current Scenario of eSignature Industry
eSignature is just a building block in contract lifecycle management for Axicos leaders. That is why they work with two vendors which they can integrate depending on clients’ preferences. Both DocuSign and FP Sign lessen the administrative burden of signing documents and shortens the time needed to push contracts through complex organizations.
In the daily business of automating contract creation in companies, Axicos is experiencing increasing demand for eSignature solutions.
Initial clients were very large companies who had large budgets and own IT departments of significant size. More and more, the company is also seeing demand from smaller companies with less in-house know-how on these topics.
“Thanks to our cloud-based offerings wan can also serve these clients. They are often innovative companies that have gotten to a certain stage in their development. They have large potential, and we hope to grow together with them”, asserts Barbara.
Future Prospects
“We are very excited to be in the middle of widespread adoption of document automation and eSignature solutions – so we believe our future is bright!”, concludes Barbara in an inspiring note.
Bernd Kottk | CEO & Co-Founder | Axicos
