How MPE Partners Rewrites the Private Equity Playbook: 4X Faster Value Creation

MPE Partners, the private equity firm that owns LACO, invests in manufacturing companies where operational leverage drives EBITDA growth. But LACO, an industrial markers manufacturer, had a common problem. Operational knowledge was trapped in workers’ heads. Best practices weren’t being shared, making it hard to improve their business.

MPE wanted to help LACO document their back office and industrial manufacturing processes, but that process would require pulling subject matter experts off the production floor for weeks, with no guarantee of ROI. 

That’s a risk when you consider today’s brutal PE math: compressed hold periods due to higher debt costs, and LPs demanding faster returns. MPE gave LACO a 4-month prove-it-or-lose-it window with Klarity, hoping AI would speed the process. 

LACO set an equally aggressive internal objective: complete documentation of all critical maintenance and operations processes within a single quarter while maintaining quality standards. 

That’s completely unheard of. 

Physical processes are insanely hard to capture. For a manufacturing company, it’s doubly complex to document what happens on the factory floor with elaborate machinery. At LACO, it wasn’t all roses at first. The AI didn’t capture all of the maintenance steps right away. So Klarity worked closely with the LACO team to configure the tool for a non-standard environment.

When Spanish-accented English caused transcription errors ("MAC" vs "MAX" equipment IDs), the Klarity team fixed it by having Spanish speakers record in Spanish with AI translation to English. Klarity’s support team responded to LACO’s feedback with a 48-hour turnaround for template improvements.

Quarter-level transformation typically takes 12+ months. But with Klarity’s Analyst onboard, LACO hit their aggressive target of complete operational documentation in 90 Days. How? Klarity’s Analyst allows workers to simply use their phones to capture what’s happening on the factory floor—a huge accelerant. Once those videos are recorded, our AI documents everything and shares best practices.  For MPE, it was important to see immediate operational gains across all processes. Here are a few of the measures of success:

Mobilize Learnings Across the Whole Portfolio

After the quick win with LACO, MPE is rolling Klarity’s technology across their portfolio, with companies like Mid States Bolt (fasteners) and Garmat seeing even faster deployment. Plus, the capture methodologies are transferable across all manufacturing operations, so the value was easy to scale and expand beyond maintenance into 8-10 functions organization-wide. 

Klarity’s Advisor offers proactive insights, giving MPE and their portfolio companies deep reasoning AI to improve their processes and expose operational inefficiencies other AI tools miss entirely. It’s become so valuable, MPE now showcases this capability with other portfolio companies for competitive intelligence and value creation acceleration.

MPE Partners needed to balance aggressive timelines with operational reality at their portfolio companies like LACO. Klarity helped them:

• Adopt a “frontline-first” approach—enabling Spanish-speaking production workers to contribute directly while maintaining manufacturing output.
• Co-develop and troubleshoot. Weekly feedback cycles with 48-hour improvement turnarounds meant technical challenges became platform-wide improvements.
• Expand beyond maintenance documentation into broader operational functions across 8-10 departments with Process Hierarchy and Insights features delivered on schedule.

Non-SMEs can now create SME-level documentation without adding headcount. A temporary QA resource with ISO 9000 experience ramped quickly to accelerate documentation, working alongside line experts. And they eliminated key person dependencies, lowering the risk that critical manufacturing processes will fail if someone gets sick or exits the company.

Accelerate Value Creation:

• Proven playbook ready for immediate deployment across MPE’s manufacturing assets
• Proprietary insights that strengthen value creation planning
• 4-month validation cycle enabling rapid decisions

Getting to premium: MPE Partners shifted from slow and incomplete documentation that stalled value creation to fast and comprehensive documentation which sets the conditions for a premium sale. 

With Klarity’s AI, frontline workers became a documenting engine without wasting time and disrupting production. With dedicated workspaces for each entity and Klarity’s continuously improving AI analyst, advisor MPE is scaling across LACO’s operational functions and other portcos. LACO has become a best in class case study in value creation for MPE, allowing them to get better returns simply by capturing the knowledge trapped in workers’ heads.

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