Explaining the Increase in the Australian Average House Completion Time:Activity-based versus Workflow-based Approach (original) (raw)

Exploring the Australian house completion time to improve housing supply

2014

The housing undersupply is a current issue in many capital cities in Australia. The relevant statistics to the housing shortage has been reported by the Australian government and housing industry associations. The gaps between demand and supply continuously have increased over the past years. Many factors contribute to the shortage of the Australian housing supply. One of the key factors is the house completion time. To overcome the shortage situation, it is significant to know how completion time can be improved. The completion time guarantees the time of housing delivery to house customers. In this paper, Little’s law is used to discuss the physics of the Australian house building. Additionally, capacity and sales and operations planning strategies are the focal aspects to improve the Australian house completion time.

Cycle time reduction in home building

Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of the …, 2001

Even Flow Production is an innovation in residential construction intended to increase the reliability of work flow. That objective is to be accomplished by adherence to a standard schedule for sale, design, construction, and turnover of a home. In turn, increased work flow reliability reduces cycle time, the time required to deliver a home to a customer. Reliability increases as variability is reduced, allowing a reduction of slack in activity durations and of inventory previously needed to accommodate that variability. Increased work flow reliability is also a necessary condition for taking other actions to reduce cycle time.

REDESIGNING THE PRODUCTION SYSTEM TO INCREASE FLEXIBILITY IN HOUSE BUILDING PROJECTS

New market requirements have demanded from industrial companies innovations in their production strategies. Mass customization is one of those innovative strategies. It combines low unit costs of mass production and product flexibility. The ability of giving to the customer the possibility to choose among several product options has also been used as a competitive advantage in the housing building sector. However, despite the growing demand for customized homes, construction companies have faced difficulties to meet clients' needs with efficiency. One of the main causes lies in the fact that most companies do not change the way project production systems are designed to cope with the customization process, leading to an increase in site rework and waste. This paper presents a research study carried out in a housing building company, which has decided to introduce a customization strategy. The production system was redesigned based on lean principles to support that strategy. This article discusses briefly different approaches for customization, as well as the implications for the design of production systems. Also, the process of redesigning production systems based on lean principles is described. Key decisions and difficulties of this process are also highlighted. The results show that the consideration of lean principles in the production system has enabled not only the delivery of a more flexible product to customers, but also has improved the way production was managed due to an increase in transparency and predictability.

Keeping Track of Productivity in House-Building

Proc. 28th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC)

The broad nature of productivity leads to different interpretations and uses depending on the purpose, context and levels giving many ways for measuring productivity. However, measuring productivity in ways that reveal substantial information for operational improvements in house-building seems challenging, and methods like single-factor productivity are reported not to be common in systematic ways to that end. It is unclear how productivity is used by house-builders on-site to control, evaluate and improve operations. This study addresses how Swedish house-building companies keep track of productivity in the processes and sub-processes of production. Productivity measurements and the control of influencing factors on productivity are discussed with findings from interviews and workshops with representatives from five Swedish housebuilding companies. Results show that some productivity measurements are done in parallel with "ordinary" project management assessments to control time and cost. Yet, most factors seemingly affecting productivity are measured qualitatively and "stay in the mind" of the managers. However, some results indicate an increased understanding amongst managers for using performance indicators to track and develop activities and processes assisted with digital tools. Still, further investigation is needed to better understand how factors influencing productivity can systematically be assessed and incorporated into methods for operational development.

Briefing: Future trends in UK housebuilding

Proceedings of the ICE - Municipal Engineer, 2012

Homes have more influence on the way that people live and behave in society than anything else they spend their money on. A house usually represents an individual's largest ever single investment, and is expected to last for decades, if not indefinitely. In order to make the most appropriate investment today, however, people need to know how they will be living and working in the future, both individually and as a society. A Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) report The Future of UK Housebuilding, published in December 2010, investigates and debates this issue. This briefing discusses the implications of the report for municipal engineers and others. In particular, the issues of sustainability, zero carbon dioxide, offsite technologies, technology changes and community impact are discussed.

Use of Workflow-Patterns for Process Modeling in the Building Industry

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations, 2004

In contrast to the predefined and static processes in most industries, the design and construction processes in the building industry are extremely dynamic. Technical conflicts and modified design goals will lead to ad-hoc changes within the workflow. They are no exception but usual. Therefore, common principles must be established throughout the construction industry, that allow for flexibly combining engineering and construction services. New members must be able to join and leave the project consortium on demand. The need to rapidly establish new organisational structures and effectively manage these virtual organisations places high demands on the methods used for modelling the processes. Consequentially, there is a need for an overall model-framework representing the different design, construction and management processes that integrates specialized process models used for different domains.

Leagile Strategies for Optimizing the Delivery of Prefabricated House Building Projects

International Journal of Construction Management, 2018

Australian housing supply has not been responded at a rate commensurate with its growing demand. Residential housing sector is facing this serious shortage issue by actively developing and effectively using new construction material, processes and practices for sustaining its competitive advantage over other construction sectors in the Australian context. The Construction 2020 report confirmed prefabrication/off-site manufacturing (OSM) as a critical vision for the Australian construction industry's future, as OSM provides opportunities for not only increased productivity and safety, but also decreased cost. It also has the capability of meeting the growing housing demand within the extant level of skilled labour. By combining lean and agile concepts, OSM's supply responsiveness and efficiency can be intensified. The current research studies the association between demand-supply housing imbalance factors using mixed methods from literature and interviews. Literature has documented four main factors that drive this imbalance: (1) housing completion time; (2) cost of a finished house; (3) customer preferences and (4) level of skilled labour. Interviews with 13 industry professionals identified the four main leagile strategies used to deliver prefabricated building projects. Literature and interview findings supported the development and validation of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) model comprising and incorporating these factors (and subfactors) and the four leagile strategies. The choice of the appropriate strategy to address the studied factors within the Australian context was optimized using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The results from the AHP model show the suitability of applying each strategy at different degrees as influenced by the tested factors.