| Forward
Despite the dramatic increases in housing production and home ownership in recent years, the home building industry still lags behind others in widespread technological innovation and adoption. Many new techniques, materials, tools, and organizational means are often localized in nature and face numerous obstacles to becoming commonplace. Automation and industrialization efforts in home building have been particularly thwarted though factory manufacturing processes in other sectors are considerably advanced. Indeed, a directed change in the housing delivery system is imperative for the home building industry to reap similar benefits and, in turn, share those benefits with the U.S. Homeowner.
The current home building industry's resource-intensive nature suggests that there is much promise for changing current design and construction practices. Through this publication and the research which supports it, HUD is directly addressing such concerns. This report describes the history of and possibilities for industrialization in the home building industry. Even more interestingly, organizational strategies are suggested that take advantage of these possibilities: information integration, physical integration, performance integration, production integration, and operations integration are each studied as contributors to the systematic development of the home building industry's technological capacity. Such a comprehensive and integrated approach to all of the techniques in home building will have dramatic consequences for home production. HUD has been directly and significantly involved with ongoing efforts towards advancing housing technology by sponsoring fundamental research in manufactured and modular housing, in improved methods and materials for traditional housing, and in the numerous regulatory and policy issues related to housing production and technology. For example, HUD's administration of the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH)¡ªthe federal initiative to accelerate the creation and widespread use of advanced technologies to radically improve the quality, durability, environmental performance, energy efficiency, and affordability of our nation's housing-has resulted in a dramatic vision for housing technology. As such, research initiatives and results like those in Industrializing the Building Site directly support the home building industry's future production capacity and the quality and cost of American homes for years to co me.
Summary
This report examines the means and methods available for integrating and industrializing the housing construction site and the housing industry. Historically, governmental leadership in the development of advanced materials and construction techniques for housing has been successful at focusing attention on new technologies but has not been able to significantly shorten adoption times due to extreme fragmentation in the materials production and construction industries. International efforts at industrialization have experienced similar fragmented successes but also have struggled with widespread adoption of advanced methods of industrialization by the homebuilding industry.
Faced with significant competition from abroad, many industries in the manufacturing sector have developed or adopted broad organizational strategies, such as Just-in-Time (JIT) supply and Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA) to reduce production costs, improve productivity, and improve product quality. Underpinning these strategies are information systems that are fully integrate d across the business enterprise.
The rapid adoption of these Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems was helped by the close scrutiny of business systems provoked by Y2K issues, increases in data network speeds, and the rise of the Internet as a business environment. Implementation of these ERP systems required industry to closely examine business and manufacturing practices and construct information models that integrate data across the research, design, inventory, production, and sales departments. The broad adoption of Object Oriented CAD software is a key step towards information integration in the housing industry. However, still to be developed are a comprehensive information model, viable linkages to field operations, and real-time tools for analysis of structural, mechanical, production and economic pe rformance.
When manufacturing made the transformation to ERP systems, the complex interrelationships between management, product development, production and distribution departments were further rationalized. Localized optimization practices were evaluated in terms of the impact on the whole enterprise. The results were significant gains in productivity and profitability due to highly integrated product development, production, and business systems. Similar gains are likely as information integration rationalizes commonly conflicting subsystems (heating/cooling, electrical, structural) reducing field modifications and common performance and operations losses. Information integration will enable higher levels of physical integration, higher levels of production integration, higher levels of performance integration, and higher levels of operations integration. The advanced industrialization resources available to builders vary according to the size of the builder's business. This report includes strategies for four scales of builders: ¡
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