Industrial housing is the strategy of the future for efficient housing. The strategy exploits the principles and work methods of production systems and is applied to the construction industry. Traditionally the construction sector considers production of one-of-a-kind products as de facto solutions. However, this strategy requires new paradigms, supporting methodologies and business models. The purpose of this thesis is to present and describe a business model that supports the strategy, which meet the project oriented market’s one-of-a-kind demands with customized multi-story houses.
Industrial manufacturing of customized houses can be accomplished by industrial strategies, such as Mass Customization. The prerequisites are that the organizational properties, mentioned in the list below, have to be integrated and adjusted to the elementary principles of industrial production and Mass Customization.
In this thesis an industrial approach was used to identify the fundamental characteristics in industrial manufacturing and Mass Customization, and its influence of the organizational properties for industrial housing. The foundations of industrial production are a standardized product structure, standardized processes, manual and machine operations, process oriented production, and controlled material flow. Mass Customization is a strategy to achieve customized but industrial produced products with the same efficiency as mass production. It is based on standardized product models, which can be configured and flexible production systems, in which process and resources can be reconfigured in a systematic way.
On the basis of this a normative business model (The MC-House) was developed, empirical tested and validated through case studies. The truck manufacture, Scania CV AB, and the industrial housing entrepreneur, NCC Komponent AB, were investigated by interviews and company archives. The result showed that on organizational property level the business model was generic and valid for industrial manufacturing of discrete configured products. In what extent individual products could be configured and produced with a certain performance, require different designs within the organizational properties. The more individual configuration that could be managed, the more complex the executive management gets. To achieve an effective business the complexity has to be met by definition, systemizing, and integration on the corresponding organizational hierarchic level as the configuration is managed.
When considered the fundamental characteristics of construction, buildings has to be assembled there it will be used, the result also showed that the production system for industrial housing should be divided in two. One stationary manufacturing system, the factory, and one mobile assemble system at the construction site. Another condition that has to be considered is that the generic product model should be able to meet the local requirements.
Further the study indicated that the a industrial housing company is different from a traditional construction company, regarding the organizational structure, the market management, production approach, product model handling, business and project processes. Within an industrial housing company the activity is process oriented around the continuous production process. This mean that a house or a project cannot be considered as strictly unique, rather just another order which is made of standardized components, produced in the same process and with same recourses as previous and future other orders. In fact an industrial housing company has more in common with organizations of industrial manufacturing than with classical construction entrepreneurs organized for project oriented and hand craft production.