About BlackTie Most hospitals have ERP platforms that cover functions for human resources, finance and materials management and clinical systems that document medical activity. While these platforms are powerful and feature-rich, they are as likely to be relatively inflexible and rigid. However, unlike major retail and financial corporations, hospitals have unusually dynamic operating environments and often lack internal IT resources (or the capital to hire outside developers) needed to modify and customize their ERP and clinical platforms to meet all of their process and operational requirements. Informal "work arounds" are usually the result and the typical hospital might have literally hundreds of manual or semi-manual steps as a result. BlackTie has identified many informal supply chain steps and clinical operational record keeping processes that exist in nearly every hospital and has designed, developed and deployed an Internet-based application engine to formalize these processes in a manner that complements and augments the functionality available from a hospital's ERP and clinical platform. We combine deep industry experience with excellence in Web-based workflow automation to create unique solutions that are simple to implement, easy to use and flexible enough to work across conditions at different hospitals. What's novel about BlackTie? No dedicated sales force. Why? There's no need. We design solutions that are universally easy to understand and adopt. While we often partner and co-promote our services with leading industry partners who can carry our message into the market, we pride ourselves on being able to effectively communicate with our target audience through our Website, our live on-line presentations and our other marketing materials. We work hard to enable you to see so that you can see our solution addressing your specific need. By communicating largely through Internet demonstrations and on-line presentations, we can keep our cost of sales low and commit more resources to application development. Licenses and transaction-based charges. We feel it is important to vary our commercial models to our service offerings and customer requirements. As such we have some services that are offered at no charge to a hospital, some that are offered under hospital or network-wide licenses and some that are transactional. This may seem counter-intuitive but we recognize that some BlackTie services deliver value incrementally and to specific individuals who truly experience an improvement in their job satisfaction through the use of our technology (e.g., the Accounts Payable clerk, the contract manager, the implant coordinator, the orthopedic sales rep). And if you're receiving value incrementally by using our applications, we're happy to accept compensation that's in-step with you. Social. As our tag line suggests, BlackTie is an invitation-driven family of applications. We fully appreciate that key staff at a client hospital have to understand how BlackTie works and how it will impact them. Once that's been settled however, other hospital staff with an identified challenge and an interest in using BlackTie simply invite colleagues, vendors and others to register with BlackTie for a particular service and participate. We firmly believe that the challenges we address are best solved cooperatively and collaboratively. BlackTie provides registrants with a forum and the functionality to do just that. And once you're registered for one application in BlackTie, extending your profile and permissions to another application is a simple, painless administrative step. Once you see how easy it is to enroll in one of our applications and get started, and how clearly BlackTie's solutions addresses the major, universal challenges that surround your specific problem, you'll fully appreciate how we invite formality... to the healthcare supply chain.