Our service offering is broad, and having a single integrated partner for every facility need is very important, but the true benefit of our approach is realized in that we create a proactive maintenance framework to extend the life of every facility that we support. Ninety-nine percent of all facility spend maps directly to operations and maintenance during the life of a building. A reactive, short-term approach to facility services results in accelerated capital spend and leads to the early demise of the building itself. Therefore, the traditional approach of “cutting corners” leads to unhappy occupants, constraints on organizational growth, increased energy consumption, decreased building lifespan, and a significant increase in total facility spend over time.

The approach of implementing short-term repairs to reactively handle facility needs is not a true solution. In fact, this historical way of doing business is far more costly than taking the long-view approach of setting defined objectives, establishing clear goals, and executing simultaneous proactive initiatives within the operational framework of gaining the longest possible lifespan from every building asset, feature, system, finish, and of course the building structure itself.

Our overarching approach is bound by [Best Practice] of utilizing the full spectrum of proactive maintenance. This approach is comprised of three fundamental components:

• Preventive maintenance is a form of maintenance scheduled over time. The main function of preventive maintenance is to keep equipment running at rated efficiencies with the key guidelines of durability, reliability, efficiency and safety.
  
• Predictive maintenance is form of maintenance based on equipment condition. Predictive maintenance uses non-destructive testing, chemical analysis, vibration and noise monitoring - as well as visual inspection to determine equipment conditions and access when maintenance should be performed.
  
• The philosophy of reliability centered maintenance combines preventive and predictive maintenance by balancing cost and the impact of equipment downtime on the facility using relationships about equipment failure rates.
  

Acting in concert, proactive maintenance is the best possible tool to deliver long-term savings to our clients. We understand that proactive maintenance is often overlooked and in most cases is the first cost to be cut from facility budgets simply because the benefits of this approach are often misunderstood. Although basic economic theory states the value of a dollar today is greater than the value of the same dollar tomorrow, there can be significant cost savings from investing in proactive maintenance. The following table highlights the savings gained by utilizing proactive maintenance:

EFI’s singular objective is to synthesize the operational goals of an organization within a framework of proactive maintenance - executed via integrated services to increase the facilities lifespan and thereby generate long-term cost savings. This is our vision, and this is how we deliver the maintenance and cost savings our clients expect.

Efforts to model failure modes are ongoing at EFI. It has been said that "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future". However, the possibility exists to characterize commonly occurring device failures. This allows for pointing to predictions that fall within these characterizations. This is an area of ongoing research at EFI. In addition, statistical studies for rule based and deep learning AI are in the works. Emphasis on computational usability and systems modernization is also under continuous improvement and testing.