Q. What is the official name of your company?
A. AECOM
Q. What year was the company founded and by whom?
A. AECOM’s founder, Richard G. Newman, shared a dream with a handful of Ashland Inc. employees of creating an industry-leading firm dedicated to making the world a better place. Richard led an employee buyout with full support of our parent, Ashland Inc., and on April 6, 1990, AECOM evolved to become an independent firm formed by the merger of five Ashland entities. While AECOM’s official founding was in 1990, some predecessor firms had distinguished histories dating back more than a century.
Q. Is your firm a subsidiary or affiliate of other companies? If so, please name those firms and their relationship to your company.
A. Since our founding in 1990, more than 50 companies have joined AECOM. Our combination with URS in 2014 is particularly of note, as it was the biggest combination in our history and more than doubled our workforce as well as revenue.
Q. Where is your company located?
A. AECOM’s headquarters are in Los Angeles, Calif., and we serve clients in more than 150 countries. In Alaska, AECOM has offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks, with smaller satellite or project offices/camps throughout the state.
Q. What is your company’s primary business activity?
A. AECOM is a premier, fully integrated professional and technical services firm positioned to design, build, finance and operate infrastructure assets around the world for public- and private-sector clients. Our employees include architects, engineers, designers, planners, scientists and management and construction services professionals. In Alaska, following the combination with URS, AECOM provides arctic-smart engineering and environmental services for the complete project life-cycle, from permitting for air, water, soils and solid waste to planning, design and construction through production and site closure.
Q. What is your company’s main strength or its edge over the competition?
A. What sets AECOM apart is our collaborative way of working globally and delivering locally. We are able to draw together, from around the world, teams of engineers, planners, architects, landscape architects, environmental specialists, economists, scientists and consultants, as well as cost construction, project and program managers, who are dedicated to delivering the most innovative and appropriate solutions.
AECOM is also ranked as the #1 engineering design firm by revenue in Engineering News-Record magazine’s annual industry rankings and has been recognized by Fortune magazine as a World’s Most Admired Company.
Q. Is your company expanding any of its operations or locations?
A. Combining with URS accelerated AECOM’s strategy of offering an integrated-delivery model with superior capabilities to design, build, finance and operate infrastructure assets by adding key capabilities and expertise in markets including construction, oil & gas, power and government services.
We have also, through the combination with URS, more than doubled our workforce, which expands our capacity to serve clients.
In Alaska specifically, we have expanded the size of our workforce threefold during the past six years.
Q. How has the AECOM-URS combination impacted Alaska?
A. Locally, the combination of AECOM and URS increased the company’s capabilities and resources, enabling us to provide greater value to clients in Alaska. AECOM’s in-state operations now consist of more than 250 engineers, scientists, planners and support staff. In addition to the increase in local resources, AECOM can now draw on a much larger, global network of experts to deliver high quality, innovative solutions to our Alaskan customers.
Q. What new markets, clients or projects is AECOM planning to expand into in the next year?
A. Joe Hegna, AECOM vice president in Alaska, says, “I like to see us implement innovative solutions. For example, we are testing unmanned aerial systems for a client on the North Slope.”
Q. What do you most want people to know about your company?
A. AECOM has a rich heritage in Alaska, which includes 75 years of executing more than 10,000 projects ranging in size from US$5,000 to US$150 million - including serving Alaska’s oil & gas industry for 45 years, since the discovery of oil in Alaska’s North Slope; and supporting the mining industry for 40 years. We are very proud of our strong relationships with Alaska Native organizations and communities.
Overall, the most important thing we want AECOM to be known for is our integrity, which is one of our core values.
Q. Are there important projects the company is currently a part of or has done recently in Alaska?
A. Locally, half of our work is for the oil & gas business. Examples include: Alaska LNG Project: This is an engineering and environmental effort where we are providing pre-front end engineering and design (pre-FEED) for the gas treatment plant and environmental baseline studies in support of the Environmental, Regulatory and Lands (ERL) function for the project; Alyeska Pipeline Service Company: This is an engineering, procurement and construction management project where we are providing general engineering, materials procurement, construction management, in-house design, drawing and documentation services for projects on the pipeline and marine terminal; BP, Prudhoe Bay: AECOM replaced the stock tank vapor, intermediate pressure (STV/IP) compressors at a Prudhoe Bay flow station; ConocoPhillips, Kuparuk: AECOM is providing FEED and detailed design services for the North East West Sak Drill Site 1H Development Project; ExxonMobil, Point Thomson: We are providing environmental support to obtain permits enabling the project, working with the designer to assure that regulatory requirements are met and assisting the client in meeting internal requirements; TransCanada, Alaska Pipeline Project: This is an engineering and environmental project where we are providing pre-FEED for the gas treatment plant and environmental baseline studies providing support for the ERL function for the project.
The other half of our work is divided into services for the private and public sectors. Recently, we have been active in mining, e.g., the Donlin Project; power, e.g., the Shemya Power Plant; infrastructure, e.g., the Ketchikan Shipyard; and remediation, e.g., Air Force Point Lay Deactivated Landfill Removal.
An interesting story is how AECOM’s service to Alaska began. In June 1942, during World War II, a large invasion force was headed toward the Alaskan mainland when it was surprised and defeated by a force of 110 U.S. Air Force bombers. The bombers had been deployed from an airbase near Dutch Harbor built by a heritage AECOM company. After the war, a high-ranking Army Officer was quoted in a magazine saying that our construction of the airbase was “the project that saved Alaska.”
Since that time, AECOM has been involved in numerous signature projects, including every major Alaska North Slope oil & gas project such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Prudhoe Bay, Kuparuk, Alpine and Northstar.
Q. What is your company’s safety record? What steps does the company take to ensure a safe work environment?
A. AECOM has an excellent safety record. We have a world-class safety program, named “Safety for Life,” that is built around employee involvement and sets the expectation that employees, contractors and business partners should take personal responsibility for keeping colleagues safe. Safety for Life also includes a behavior based program for which safety concerns and near misses are both reported and investigated with a fit-for-purpose review. Safety is another of our core values.
Q. What is the address of your company’s Web site?
A. www.aecom.com
