Company History

Solving Manufacturing’s Toughest Challenges

During his previous role as engineering and maintenance manager for a large manufacturer, EFI Group’s managing partner, Ken Parezo, routinely hired engineering consultants to expedite project development and implementation.

While Ken found engineering consulting firms to be fairly effective when given a highly defined approach and solution, he grew frustrated at the consultants’ inability to dig into manufacturing problems and develop creative, viable and cost-effective solutions.

Ken recognized industry’s need for a group of seasoned engineering professionals who could easily step into a client’s shoes and solve real-world manufacturing challenges.

In 1999, Ken Parezo established EFI Group to provide a pool of experienced engineering and manufacturing consultants able to make an immediate, positive and permanent impact on client operations.

Today, every EFI Group team member:

Brings extensive experience working in manufacturing environments.
Clearly understands the profit and loss implications/consequences of engineering and manufacturing management decisions.
Has a mandate to dig deeper into the presented problem in order to ascertain the larger picture, uncover potential and, ultimately, develop more effective and innovative engineering solutions.

In addition, EFI Group has built strong relationships with other engineering and professional organizations that are able to bring highly specialized industry-related knowledge and skill sets, resulting in a full-service operation with the keen attention and determined attitude of a small consultancy.

Read how our approach demonstrates our inside industry perspective.

EFI Group is a manufacturing engineering firm practicing process engineering, process design, design engineering, manufacturing technology and engineering services. EFI Group is based in Pikesville, Maryland (MD) and serves clients throughout North America.

We hired EFI Group to help us figure out a project and scope it, and I felt confident they would keep a keen eye on it. They had to deliver quickly and they did it well. They are especially good at project management when you don’t have the resources to do it internally. Reliability is the word I would use to describe EFI Group.

— Coatings Industry Professional

EFI Group is timely. We’ve had a lot of situations when we’ve been in a time crunch and they’ve responded very quickly. They are detail oriented and efficient. They’re a good group of people who also have a lot of strength in pre-engineering — the thought process to get to preliminary design and making sure we’ve investigated all the potential asks of a project to ensure we didn’t miss anything. They have great attention to detail up front which is very important to any project because having that detail-oriented deep dive into the pre-engineering phase sets the stage for the success of the rest of the project, making the process smoother and making it much easier to keep the project on schedule and on budget.

— Mike Quigley, Engineering & Maintenance Manager, Food Industry

I’ve worked with EFI Group for a while, so I know they have a good, knowledgeable staff. We know we’re going to get the results from them we expect. From my interactions with all the different EFI team members I’ve worked with, I know they have knowledge across many industries. Equally, I never have to follow up with EFI Group and, in some cases, they keep me on track.

— Ryan Fredsall, General Manager, Pacer Minerals LLC

We view EFI Group as a team that can dimensionalize our capability to execute projects. We can articulate what it is we want to do and they can take that input and run with it without much intervention from us. They’re able to move a project along independently and only engage us when it’s time to bring us up to speed or get more input to drive a project to conclusion. That’s one of the reasons I view them as an excellent contractor.

— Environmental Engineering Industry Professional

EFI Group has good engineers and good customer service. We know when we get an EFI engineer on a project, we’re going to a get a good job from them and it’s been a productive relationship for both of us — I genuinely like the people.

— Corporate Director, Project Management in Food & Flavors Industry