Tom Moriarty, president of Alidade MER Inc., is a natural problem solver. After retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, he began maintenance and reliability engineering consulting. In the transition he identified organizational performance in operations and maintenance as areas with opportunities. BIC Magazine recently visited with Moriarty about how that led to the start of Alidade MER.
Q: What led you to start Alidade MER?
A: Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than solving problems and helping others to achieve and sustain success. The Alidade business model was developed to customize support for clients. Our full-time staff is lean, with a bullpen of highly experienced professionals. We focus on what the customer needs. Our reliability professionals have high job satisfaction, resulting in high customer satisfaction. Empowering our team members to do what’s best for the customer has resulted in a 72-percent repeat customer rate and a 97-percent job satisfaction rate from our team members.
Q: What surprised you most about Alidade MER once it took off?
A: The diversity of projects we have been involved in. We started out with maintenance and reliability engineering projects like assessments, implementation of planning and scheduling, materials management, and leadership development. From there we developed the Organizational Reliability Model©. We then got into proactive reliability projects such as root cause analysis, reliability centered maintenance, etc., which led to optimized preventive and predictive maintenance program development.
Q: Why is Alidade MER successful?
A: The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. We stress integrity. In my former career I had many opportunities to hire professional services and I understand what a customer is looking for: insight, advice and support from professionals who have the customer’s best interest at heart. When we deliver services that our customers appreciate they ask us to support additional projects, and they become advocates, and provide enthusiastic references.
Q: What are the most important things a person should know before starting on a path of strategic change?
A: The most important thing… do not underestimate the need for consistent, sustained support from senior leadership. A major change effort is a three to five year journey. It’s hard. Anyone that tells you they have a magic wire to short circuit the time it takes for new behaviors to become a common practice or culture change.
