From Foundation to Rooftop, Whole Housing Building Roadmap Generates Ways to Streamline the Building Process

The construction of large products such as cars and houses requires the navigation of complex processes from start to finish. But while industrialization and the invention of the assembly line revolutionized the automobile industry, those same gains have not yet been fully realized in the housing industry. Home building is still mostly done by a myriad of small, locally based developers who rely on an extensive network of subcontract laborers and suppliers.
The "Whole House and Building Process Redesign" Technology Roadmap brainstorms ways that such a dispersed housing industry can implement standardization mechanisms to expedite the building process and reduce costs. The Roadmap states as its goal that by 2010, home design and construction should be efficient, predictable, and controllable with a median time cycle of 20 working days from groundbreaking to occupancy with resulting cost savings that make homeownership available to 90 percent of the population.

Barriers to Industrialization

The Roadmap identifies several challenges that must be overcome before systems can be implemented to improve the whole house building process.

• Industrialized homebuilding has the potential to reduce consumer choice in a market where consumers expect more choices and customization.
  
• The regulatory process can impose significant cost penalties and stall the construction process.
  
• Builders are resistant to use new technology due to the high risks associated with implementation.

To address these barriers, the Roadmap presents a series of issues for further research. These issues are outlined in the following sections.

The Need for Change Management and Systems Thinking

Improvements to the whole house building and design process must first address the slowness in adopting new technologies and the absence of systems science and engineering in building products manufacturing. These issues are well known and frequently lamented in the building industry. The Roadmap suggests that a framework to manage the introduction of technology and to create an environment that facilitates systems solutions must be developed before other PATH research and development priorities in whole housing building can be addressed.

The Advantages of Industrialization

The Roadmap also suggests that additional research should be done to consider the application of industrialized processes to the home building industry to achieve higher levels of production efficiency. Substituting capital for labor will make the building process more like manufacturing and increase efficiency while improving quality and safety. The Roadmap also states that industrialized home building in the future must remain flexible and easily customized to meet consumer preferences-advantages currently available with onsite builders.

Completing the Process

The final section of the Roadmap contains proposals to improve home construction. Building time and costs could be reduced if more pieces could be manufactured off-site and delivered to the construction site intact. In addition, integrating mechanical systems, such as flooring modules that incorporate HVAC ducting or radiant heat, could reduce costs, decrease labor requirements, and improve energy efficiency.