Industrial Process Safety and Automation Company aeSolutions Celebrates 25th Anniversary

The company will continue to focus on employee development and recruitment and growing client services as it looks to the future.

July 13, 2023 - aeSolutions, a consulting, engineering, and systems integration company that provides industrial process safety and automation products and services, today announced that the company is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its founding.Founded by Brian Merriman, Mike Scott, and current president Ken O'Malley, the company opened its first office location in Greenville SC in 1998. With a focus on value-driven engineering, aeSolutions set out to solve the complex challenges faced by industrial clients. The company’s commitment to serving clients nationwide quickly drove expansion into new locations and ventures. In 2001, aeSolutions opened a 14,000 square foot fabrication shop, which allowed the company to provide cost-effective and safe solutions for integrated Burner Management Systems (BMS) and Combustion Control Systems (CCS). Two further office locations followed, first in Anchorage, Alaska (2007), and then Houston, Texas (2010), and during the Alaska oil market boom, the company grew to 175 employees.The company’s service offerings began to expand rapidly with the addition of a Process Safety Management division. That team grew to include other new areas of expertise and knowledge in areas such as Alarm Management and Machinery Safety. When the leadership team at aeSolutions recognized the need in the process industry for a database-driven safety lifecycle platform, one that was created by engineers for engineers, the aeShield software solution was born. aeShield, which has helped to greatly improve the safety of the process industry, has grown into its own organization and is now headed by co-founder Mike Scott.Along with its remarkable successes, aeSolutions has experienced its share of difficulties. The combination of the death of CEO Brian Merriman in 2014, followed immediately by the oil market crash in 2015, created a challenging time for the company. Combined, these two events required aeSolutions to develop new leaders and to diversify in new geographies and markets all at the same time. These challenges helped forged the company into a more mature and resilient organization. “Throughout aeSolutions’ ups and downs, the thing I have been most proud of is the consistency with which we have prioritized the retention and development of our people. We have many long-tenured employees who could work anywhere, and they choose aeSolutions as their professional home. Our Company Vision places our employees as top priority with the understanding that if we treat our employees well, our clients will be the beneficiaries,” said O’Malley. “And when it comes to our clients, we work every problem from a risk-management approach, always striving to be a guide and not a guard. Our clients trust us to be a relentless and inclusive partner that holds the entire project team accountable in pursuing the right solution - which isn’t always the easiest - while balancing risk and reward. I am very proud of my company’s ethical and even-keeled behavior even during the very hardest of times.”“Leading this company has been a humbling experience. People do not follow the smartest person or even the person with the best ideas. They follow the person they trust to be of consistent character, someone who shows enthusiasm for the future and has a vision for what is possible,” O’Malley continued. “I am so proud of our employees and leadership team, who inspire me by consistently putting the greater good ahead of their own interests. They all seek to embody aeSolutions’ core values.”As aeSolutions celebrates and looks beyond the quarter-century mark, the company will continue to prioritize supporting its employees in pursuit of their full potential. The leadership team at aeSolutions understands that its people are the company’s most important resource and that its people provide the depth and breadth of the company’s domain expertise. Accordingly, the company will continue to make significant investments in creating and improving employee development programs and creating new opportunities for growth.Additionally, aeSolutions will continue to strive to be guides for its clients’ success both in their projects and overall. aeSolutions is a stand-alone when it comes to its expertise in areas of regulatory compliance and critical automation and safety systems. Areas of expertise include guiding clients in the development of Process Safety Management programs; facilitating hazards analysis workshops; and designing, building, configuring, testing, and starting these systems up in the field. Going forward, the company will work to continuously improve the linking of its front-end consulting services with its back-end engineering and automation teams in order to execute larger, more complex projects and to ultimately bring real, lasting value to its clients on a larger scale.“aeSolutions has come a long way from its days as a start-up, when we would meet in the bonus room at Brian Merriman’s house. We had little to no air conditioning and had to contend with squirrels eating the electrical wiring in Brian’s attic. We spent as much time trying to catch squirrels as we did executing project work,” said O’Malley. “To see what the company has become fills me with tremendous pride. We have consistently been a steadfastly hard-working, ethical, high-value, dependable partner and are always seeking win-win outcomes. I am thankful for the support of our employees, leadership team and clients, and I look forward to the exciting future we have ahead of us.”

In business since 1998, aeSolutions is a consulting, engineering and systems integration company that provides industrial process safety and automation products and services. They specialize in helping industrial clients achieve their risk management and operational excellence goals through expertise in process safety, combustion control and safeguarding, safety instrumented systems, control system design and integration, alarm management, and related operations and integrity management systems.

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