A synergistic supply chain enhancing offsite manufacturing uptake in Australian house building

Offsite manufacturing could become a key innovation for the future of Australian house building due to its capacity in meeting the growing housing demand, green construction and fewer requirements for labour force. It is a modern construction method where house building involves offsite factories and onsite construction. Three major challenges for managing the two working sites are broken junction, jumbled on-site process and vague demands from unclear customers. The two sites have several forms of non-value added activities. On the other hand, the house customisation adds more complexities to the design specification that leads to slow response to achieve house customer demand in short time. This is a proposition paper which aims to explore the opportunity of offsite manufacturing in Australia. This research conducts the offsite manufacturing exploration by reviewing the related literature. The research discovers that incorporating lean and agile concepts could overcome the existing barriers of offsite manufacturing uptake in Australia. Therefore, four house building strategies: built to stock, assemble to order, design to order, and self-building house are introduced for different house building alternatives in Australia.

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