Michael Mullens

Continuous improvement is a reflection of the culture of a company whose goal is to respond to the needs of its customers. It may not only result in better customer satisfaction, but in increased productivity, profitability and employee satisfaction. This paper presents a study of how a continuous improvementbased quality management system might be implemented in the modular housing industry. Fundamental quality concepts such as mission statement, measurement, continuous improvement, employee empowerment, training, rewards and leadership are identified and described in the context of the industry. Best practices for each quality concept are identified based on a benchmarking study of industry leaders. The results indicated that the most valued elements of a quality system are management involvement, a company-wide quality culture emphasizing a team approach to problem solving, and an employee reward system linked to company strategy.

Industrialized housing manufacturers build large-scale, custom housing components on near synchronous production lines with negligible automation. While labor represents a relatively small fraction of production cost, it has a substantial impact on operations. If the labor provided does not match production needs, bottlenecks form and quality suffers. The numerous production operations, lengthy cycle times and extensive product customization have discouraged manufacturers from accurately estimating labor needs as a function of product mix. This paper describes a spreadsheet based labor estimating and planning system based on expert opinion. The Expert Labor Forecaster (ELF) is meant to be a first step in an evolutionary process toward more rigorous labor estimating, planning and control. The paper also describes a concept for efficient, real time labor data collection and reporting. Using wireless laser scanners, a wireless LAN and database technology, the system gathers and summari...

Competitive pressure in the industrialized housing industry is resulting in an increasingly complex mix of custom home designs and homebuyer options. While good news for the homebuyer, this is often problematic on the production floor, which must respond to design variations without a substantive understanding of how they impact the roughly fifty production activities. This paper describes an approach for collecting, analyzing, reporting and using labor data to manage shop floor operations for housing manufacturers. The approach couples barcode scanning and wireless communications technologies with custom software, enabling employees to easily record their activities on a real-time basis. Web-based software provides analysis and reporting of production performance from either a real-time or historical perspective. The paper summarizes lessons learned from early implementation efforts, including both technical and organizational concerns affecting data accuracy and user acceptance, a...

This paper describes a Kaizen blitz for a moderate volume homebuilder who wanted to incorporate lean thinking into the construction process. Several issues made this Kaizen unique. First, the homebuilder used factory-built modules, which suggested that the Kaizen team must be extended up the supply chain to include both the manufacturer and builder. Second, conventional concepts of continuous flow and batch production were extended to a project oriented construction environment. This paper describes how these issues were resolved and presents actual results. Results included substantial reductions in construction cycle time and significant improvements in safety, quality, productivity and energy efficiency.

This paper examines the current state of the U.S. industrialized housing industry and two recent industry efforts to innovate. The first approach takes a revolutionary approach, investing heavily in new designs, materials, and production technologies. The second effort takes an evolutionary, continuous improvement approach based on lean production principles. The success of each effort is summarized and conclusions given.

Residential construction efforts in the U.S. are highly fragmented, and this has slowed the application of new technologies. While there has been an increase in the use of manufactured subcomponents in homes, the introduction of modern manufacturing processes and controls has been slow. To aid development of energy efficient, affordable housing, we are revisiting the process of designing and building a manufactured home. This study uses a concurrent engineering approach to examine the production of an essential component in industrialized housing, the exterior structural wall panel. We apply Quality Function Deployment to integrate the customer's requirements into the product design. This paper focuses on the methodology for identification and prioritization of those customer requirements through the integration of the Analytic Hierarchy Process with Quality Function Deployment.

... Mark E. Kelley, III Building Science Engineering 85 Depot Road Harvard, MA 01451 ... References 1. Boer, H., Berger, A., Chapman, R. and Gertsen, F. (Eds.), 2000, CI Changes: from Suggestion Box to Organizational Learning – Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia ...

By the year 2006, almost half of the world’s population is expected to live in urban settlements, and it is estimated that the global urbanization level will exceed 60% by the year 2030. Providing housing and supporting infrastructure such as water supply, sewerage, electricity, and accessibility to rapidly increasing urban populations worldwide is one of the key challenges for respective governments, industry, and international agencies. Urban housing and supporting infrastructure development is a major aspect of development policy for most developed as well as developing countries Global Trends 2004 . The United States and India represent most of the urban development characteristics associated with a typical developed and developing country, respectively. These two nations are actively working on developing strategies for dealing with urban housing and supporting infrastructure needs, and are facing tremendous challenges in these terms Kosambi 1994; Syal et al. 2002 . Presently, the U.S. construction industry spending is around $1 trillion and approximately 40% is spent on single and multi-family housing and about 25% is spent on the infrastructure Syal 2004 . In the case of India, current annual investment in construction is around $70 billion with an identified need for an additional $50 billion and a projected annual growth rate of 15%. It is estimated that supporting infrastructure will need an investment of around $163 billion over the next 10 years CIDC 2004 . Developing countries like India are experiencing a huge exodus of rural population into urban areas. These in-migrants are settling in the urban centers and peripheries. This trend is creating an urban crisis characterized by highly increased demand for

... Mark E. Kelley, III Building Science Engineering 85 Depot Road Harvard, MA 01451 ... References 1. Boer, H., Berger, A., Chapman, R. and Gertsen, F. (Eds.), 2000, CI Changes: from Suggestion Box to Organizational Learning – Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia ...

... Mark E. Kelley, III Building Science Engineering 85 Depot Road Harvard, MA 01451 ... References 1. Boer, H., Berger, A., Chapman, R. and Gertsen, F. (Eds.), 2000, CI Changes: from Suggestion Box to Organizational Learning – Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia ...

... Mark E. Kelley, III Building Science Engineering 85 Depot Road Harvard, MA 01451 ... 2. Boer, H., Berger, A., Chapman, R. and Gertsen, F. (Eds.), 2000, CI Changes: from Suggestion Box to Organizational Learning – Continuous Improvement in Europe and Australia, Ashgate ...

Industrialized housing manufacturers build large-scale, custom housing components on near synchronous production lines with negligible automation. While labor represents a relatively small fraction of production cost, it has a substantial impact on operations. If the labor provided does not match production needs, bottlenecks form and quality suffers. The numerous production operations, lengthy cycle times and extensive product customization have discouraged

... Focus Area 1: Michael Mullens, University of Central Florida and Mark Hastak, Purdue UniversityFocus Area 2: Steven Cramer, University of Wisconsin-MadisonFocus Area 3: EricBurnett, Penn State UniversityFocus Area 4: Ted Koebel, Virginia Tech UniversityFocus Area ...