INDUSTRIALIZING THE RESIDENTIAL CONSTRUCTION SITE Phase IV Production Simulation

Disclaimer The statements and conclusions contained in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The authors have made every effort to verify the accuracy and appropriateness of the report's content. However, no guarantee of the accuracy or completeness of the information or acceptability for compliance with any industry standard or mandatory requirement of any code, law, or regulation is either offered or implied. The products and systems described in the report are included only as examples of some available choices. No endorsement, recommendation, or evaluation of these products or their use is given or implied. Preface Millions of homes are constructed annually in the United States, resulting in a home ownership rate that has reached record highs in the last few years. This demand for new houses has greatly benefited the home building industry, which has implemented and used several design and construction improvements to keep up with the tremendous need for new homes in America's cities and towns. Yet most of these productions improvements focused on customization of individual houses rather than on the production process for a wide number of houses. To gain insight into the main principles underlying production improvement, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began to fund research in an area known as " industrializing the residential construction site. " Four years ago, a new research focus examined ways to automate the home construction process, improve construction work flows, and practically coordinate construction sites. Researchers identified five areas for transforming the construction site in the first year of the research program. Of these five, HUD chose " information integration " as the enabling form of knowledge key to transforming the residential construction site from a craft-based traditional model to an information-driven manufacturing model. In year two, researchers focused on studying the flow, filtering, and timely availability of information. Research results indicated that the residential construction industry requires a coherent information integration strategy that will facilitate the meaningful flow of information as well as the effective provision of information management to all levels within the enterprise. In year three, researchers studied the production framing process in detail and identified production bottlenecks at the interfaces between craft and mass production and between documents and subcontractors. It was found that the residential construction industry is laden with paperwork that …