Platte River Equity (“Platte River”) is pleased to introduce a new spotlight series highlighting FLOWS, its proprietary value-creation framework applied across its portfolio companies. FLOWS organizes value creation into five disciplines: Financial Systems, Leadership Optimization, Operations, Whole-Value Margin and Strategic Growth.
The “F” in FLOWS, Financial Systems, is where Platte River starts, because a clean, common financial backbone is what makes every other value creation lever possible. Before a company can price with discipline, integrate acquisitions cleanly or give its leaders a real-time view into the business, it needs one system of record and trustworthy data running through it. Platte River portfolio company TIPCO Technologies (“TIPCO”), a value-added distributor of fluid conveyance and sealing solutions, demonstrates what “F” looks like in practice.
- When Platte River partnered with TIPCO in December 2023, the initial focus was to integrate the collection of companies that had been acquired under previous ownership onto a common system, Epicor Prophet 21.
- To date, the team has completed ten ERP transitions, six of them in 2025 alone, while also opening two greenfield locations and closing nine add-on acquisitions. That consolidation enabled TIPCO to standardize pricing across branches, share inventory visibility network-wide and fold in new acquisitions through a repeatable playbook.
- The quickest payoff came from an unglamorous corner of the business, purchase order (PO) confirmations. TIPCO’s historical manual process handled approximately 900 POs per customer service specialist each month. Working with a third-party specialist, Platte River’s Operations team built an AI workflow on top of the consolidated ERP that now processes more than three times that number. The tool matches price and quantity between each purchase order and the vendor confirmation, then writes the expected delivery date back into the system automatically.
- The same team now handles far more volume, and inside sales responds to customers faster. Because the workflow enforces correct cost and part numbers, it now catches missed supplier price increases that should be passed along to customers.
“The ‘F’ isn’t glamorous, and that’s the point,” said Nick Moscaritolo, Managing Director of Portfolio Company Operations at Platte River. “Once a company is on one system with clean data, everything downstream gets easier – pricing, procurement, integration, the use of AI. TIPCO is a clear example. The ERP work created the foundation, and the return showed up in margin we didn’t give away.”
Platte River looks forward to sharing the remaining FLOWS pillars in future installments of this series.
