Pros
A&B has an excellent understanding of the food business. They have the best facilities I've ever seen for fabricating, refurbishing and designing tanks. The instrumentation (automation) department is very good. There is a lot of hustle in their shops.
Cons
Their sales staff doesn't know when they're being taken for a ride. Operating companies frequently bait them with bids to get some help with CIP systems. This results in a lot of wasted effort and exhausted engineers. They take on work, like in pharmaceuticals, where they have no expertise. I think they hope to grow some. The cost estimation group doesn't know what they are doing. I was involved in a half dozen bids and found numerous errors --- in part because they're over-worked --- in part because they make mistakes. A key flaw at A&B is that they don't have modeling software: one bid under-sized the pumps by more than 50% --- this does not impress customers and engineers are left to re-run simplified calculations that are wrong. Cost estimation, like sales, merely hand off their mistakes to the next department and so on. When I was there I never saw a contract completed within the original budget. A&B seemed to live off the discounts provided by vendors for equipment and instruments. Management seemed fickle. They fired the entire automation department a few years back. Then, they realized they needed them--- too late!