Flowtech rebuilt its digital infrastructure, acquired a competitor and landed a significant contract all within a year
The leading specialist provider of hydraulics, pneumatics and process engineering solutions across the UK, Ireland and the Benelux, Flowtech offers customers market-leading product ranges, access to superior global brands and extensive services. In the year since we last spoke, the company has undergone a digital revolution of sorts, rebuilding its e-commerce platform to deliver a significantly improved experience for customers. Mike England, CEO, explains what drove that decision and what the process involved.
“When I joined Flowtech in April 2023, I took time to assess all areas of the business and conducted customer surveys to understand how we were being perceived. One area that came back with a consistently high degree of frustration was our web platform. It was not meeting our expectations; upload speeds were frequently slow, customers struggled to find what they needed, and the overall experience simply was not good enough. The website was also operating exclusively within the product distribution in the UK part of our business. We had an entirely separate web platform in Benelux and no website at all in Ireland. At that time, many parts of the business were still operating relatively independently, because we had not finished integrating them.
“Given that we did not have a particularly strong company-wide digital capability or platform, I brought in an external organization to assess what we had and help us determine whether we needed to improve it or rebuild it entirely. Through that process, we brought in a completely new leadership team, including some people who came from outside this industry but possessed significant digital expertise. Chris Park, our Digital Marketing Technology Leader, spent much of his career in retail and understands that companies need a full digital ecosystem rather than a website alone. In addition to the website, we needed the right product information management system, an effective customer data platform, and more to make the whole machine work end to end. By the end of 2024, we concluded that we needed to rebuild from the ground up and create a scalable digital and technology infrastructure capable of supporting our ambitions for the future,” he enlightens.
Rebuilding a digital infrastructure is not a small task. For Flowtech, the process began with selecting a partner, ultimately resulting in a partnership with a progressive, future-proof Austrian technology company. From the beginning, its priority was to have complete control of the platform with the ability to develop it long-term, remain agile and continuously improve based on customer feedback. The process took over a year, with Flowtech bringing together people from across the business alongside external partners and taking its time to properly launch the website. In the meantime, the company also worked to make as many improvements as possible to the existing platform. In August 2025, Flowtech launched phase one of its new company-wide platform across its UK market. A rollout to Ireland and Benelux is planned for the first quarter of this year, at which point the entire business will be operating on a single, unified Flowtech platform for the first time. Beyond selling products to customers, the new website clearly presents the full breadth of Flowtech’s proposition and capabilities. The company’s investments in improving its digital infrastructure have already paid off: the website load time has dropped from eight seconds to one, over 120,000 products are now showcased, and new customer acquisition through the platform has increased by over 90 percent. That said, Flowtech is still working through a list of further improvements, and the platform will continue to evolve in the months and years ahead.
Company growth
While the digital platform brings the business together internally, Flowtech’s growth ambitions extend beyond its existing borders, as demonstrated by the announcement of its latest acquisition in January. “Finalizing the acquisition of Q Plus, a Netherlands-based business, marks an important step in continuing to meet our European growth ambitions. We already had a presence in the Netherlands through a location in Deventer which we brought under the Flowtech umbrella last year as part of consolidating our Benelux operations. While it supplies a lot of pneumatic products, it has not given us the size and scale we are looking for. To change that, we have been working with the team at Q Plus for the last 12 months in order to complete the acquisition, which will more than double the size of our Benelux business. Q Plus is a Rotterdam-based company specializing in pneumatic and air compression technology, with strong manufacturing and assembly capabilities, as well as established relationships with some of the largest OEMs in Europe and globally,” Mike reveals.
As Flowtech continues its expansion across Europe with the acquisition of Q Plus, it is simultaneously showcasing its engineering expertise in the continent through a landmark infrastructure contract in Ireland. The Rice Bridge is an existing twin bascule bridge that connects both sides of Waterford’s city center. It allows traffic across the river, with both sides of the bridge able to rise independently when boats need to pass. “We were awarded a Mechanical, Electrical, Instrumentation, Controls and Automation (MEICA) contract and are acting as principal contractor on this project,” says Mike.
“Specifically, we have been engaged to replace the entire machinery system, including the electrical motors, the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) control panels and the human machine interface. Working to an important timeline agreed with our client, Waterford County Council, the design phase is now complete, and we are moving into procurement and manufacturing, before progressing to the installation stage in collaboration with several subcontractors. Next year, we will take the bridge out of operation in phases to replace the entire machinery system and restore the bridge’s full operational capability. The contract value was publicly stated at approximately €4 million, and we are managing delivery over an 18-month to two-year period,” he ends.
With a unified digital platform, a strengthened European footprint and a landmark infrastructure contract under its belt, Flowtech has demonstrated that its ambitions extend well beyond incremental improvement. In just over a year, the company has rebuilt its technological foundations from the ground up, more than doubled its Benelux presence, and commenced a complex, high-profile civil engineering project. The organization appears well-positioned to enter its next chapter – one defined by greater scale, deeper capability and a genuinely unified identity across every market it serves.