Industrializing the Residential Construction
Site Phase III: Production Systems (June 2002, 69 p.)
The construction of homes in the United States has reached
record highs over the last few years. While the home building
industry has made incredible advances in materials and quality,
it still lags behind other industries in technological innovation
in production-that is, in providing new homes more quickly
and more efficiently while still keeping homes affordable
and at a high standard. There is much to be done, and there
is much that all of the home building industry would like
to see done.
Three years ago, HUD began an ongoing research project to
address this crisis. While much of HUD's technological research
work looks at the building materials, we realized how important
construction processes are for homes and homebuilders. Ways
to automate home construction processes, to improve construction
workflows, and to coordinate construction sites-known as Industrializing
the Residential Construction Site- became a new research focus.
In the first year's effort, Phase I,
researchers laid out five areas that best contained the possibility
of transforming the construction site: production integration,
operations integration, performance integration, information
integration, and physical integration.
Of these five, HUD first explored "information integration"
to see how information exchanges, relationships, and mechanisms
shaped construction operations. The resulting document, Phase
II: Information Mapping, included an amazing record of
the information flows and breaks on construction sites, as
well as recommendations for overcoming these breaks. The second
project, which is detailed here in Phase III: Production Systems,
explores the impact of such information breaks on actual workflow.
A variety of technical and managerial approaches are studied
that will lead to more rapid construction production, with
better planning and coordination, and with more efficient
material and labor use.
HUD's comprehensive approach to process, the basic building
block of any industry's work, will have dramatic consequences
for all of housing production. This ongoing exploration opens
an entirely new approach to helping homebuilders and building
trades understand how their work is structured, and how it
can be improved. Ultimately, these improvements will also
benefit America's homeowners. Research initiatives and results
like those in this series directly support the home building
industry's future production capacity and the quality and
cost of American homes for years to come.
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