Offsite Manufacturing in Developing Countries: Current Situation and Opportunities

The mainstream of people living in the developing countries hardly affords a quality house. Housing providers are in a continuous challenge to provide affordable and high quality houses. Offsite manufacturing is a modern method of building houses and has not been widely employed by house builders in developing countries. The house components are produced in offsite factories and transported to the construction site to be assembled. This allows building houses at a controlled environment to ensure high quality, less cost and minimal completion time. An attempt to use offsite manufacturing for improving housing supply in developing countries is presented in this study. It targets the policy makers, developers and designers at the housing sectors in those countries. This paper conducted a systematic review of the literature in 24 developing housing context. Moreover, this paper proposes a leagile supply chain to manage the offsite manufacturing. It is designed to include an integration of lean and agile. Last PlannerTM System is used for better coordination among stakeholders. This paper suggests two house building strategies for developing countries. It attempts to include a framework for further research to explore the uptake of prefabricated houses in developing countries.