Review of Factory Design for Modular Homebuilding: Equipping the Modular Factory for Success by Michael A. Mullens

Members of the homebuilding community, from industry stakeholders to academia, understand the complexity of the topic, and the promise—and usefulness—of manufacturing for the future of the industry. Factory Design for Modular Homebuilding presents a practical side to prefabricated homebuilding, specifically modular homebuilding factory design and process planning. For future homebuilding concerns, the factory approach, when implemented properly, arguably holds much of the industry’s promise.

Readers without prior knowledge of homebuilding will be quickly immersed in the general complexities of the industry, barriers, and solutions through the promise of the factory process. Readers will then experience a thorough and detailed description of step-by-step processes for success in factory modular homebuilding (moving from a builder’s perspective to an industrial engineer’s perspective). For an industry that needs practical and applied solutions, this book has much to offer (early in the preface, Mullens writes that “members of the prefabricated homebuilding community [were] enlisted as partners in [our] research”). Nevertheless, caution should be used to recognize the focused nature of such solutions. Academics in construction may be left wanting for an application of larger industry theories and trends, such as software and management implications, but this is not the goal of the work.

Organizationally speaking, Mullens’s book is compact, with five chapters that review a lot of information. Mullens begins with an overview of modular homebuilding, and its promise and reality in the context of the current homebuilding industry. As a literature review, the first chapter provides an excellent synthesis of current thinking, concepts, concerns, and the ability for modular factory design to provide solutions in residential construction. For academics, chapters 2–3 and 5 would be most applicable to construction classroom needs regarding the topics of building layout, technical design, process planning, quality control, basic estimating, and management and operation systems. The concepts of capacity management through lean production and mass customization are introduced as theoretical constructs early in the text, serving as a basis for later implementation strategies. Chapter 3 delves into the details of process planning, quality control, and organization of the building process. Chapter 4 is most applicable to an industrial systems engineering audience by providing a valuable, albeit long, description of modular home factory design. Here, Mullens introduces value-stream mapping and applies it to the assembly line, engineering the production process for cycle times, safety, workforce needs, and specific workstation design, depending on areas of the home. Chapter 4 takes the organization of the building process (chapter 3) and engineers staging for the factory setting, concluding with an informative case study that illustrates an effective industrial application of the concepts. Finally, chapter 5 offers business and management topics for students regarding team organization and planning, design procurement, factory fit-out, and ongoing operations.

Industry stakeholders will appreciate the book on the basis of its ability to effectively demonstrate complex concepts in a straight-forward, diagrammatic fashion. Chapters 2 and 3 offer concepts through common homebuilding tasks to which many could relate or apply their business process. The most difficult portion of the book, in terms of applicability, is chapter 4 in which Mullens shows his industrial engineering and modular factory building roots. Industry stakeholders are saved here by his case study that applies all of the concepts directly to a real-life example. Where Mullens may arguably become too technical, he applies it again to an industry that requires tacit education.

The book concludes, as part of chapter 5, with a brief discussion of additional innovations for the future of factory homebuilding, along with barriers to adoption, including optimum value engineering for framing, supersize building materials, and real-time information systems. Academically speaking, this ending offers the least amount of investigation (again, not the goal), as it stops short of exploring these topics in depth, or introducing many topics in management and information technologies that may be applicable. Information modeling, smart-home technologies, and the robust concepts of product commercialization are obvious omissions.

Overall, Mullens’s work provides an interesting look at housing design and development at a pivotal time. Its practical approach allows readers, both industrial and academic, to grasp the complexities of homebuilding and modular factory designs and processes. For graduate-level courses that focus on innovative housing solutions and alternatives to site-built processes and economies of scale, this book would add an interesting dimension to discussions about engineering interventions to traditional homebuilding and the role of the factory in today’s economy.