Manufactured Housing Production Process and Layout Design

Housing industry is continuously looking at various ways to industrialize its production process. Around one third of all houses are now produced in the factory setting and manufactured housing leads, in production numbers, among all factory-built housing. Since World War II, the manufactured homes have come a long way, from the trailers to one of the most preferred and popular forms of factory built housing. In 1999, around 21.4 million Americans lived in manufactured homes. It has been estimated that the annual need for housing units typically exceeds 2 million, whereas, annual housing supply has been around 1.75 million during the 1980's and is estimated to be around 1.5 million during the 1990's and 2000. In view of the increasing demand for housing units, the housing industry has tried various production approaches. In the process of industrializing their product, the industry is constantly identifying and solving many production process related obstacles. A major obstacle faced by the housing producers is the lack of guidelines for either converting old production plants or designing new plants to increase productivity. This paper reports on the on-going research in the area of manufactured housing production at Michigan State University. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation's Partnership in Advancing Technologies in Housing (PATH) initiative. The goal of this research is to produce systematic guidelines for the design of a layout for a manufactured housing production plant. For this purpose, the tools and techniques available in the field of industrial engineering and supply chain management disciplines were investigated. Space and proximity requirements in a production plant were developed and a layout design software program, FactoryPLAN, was used to generate production layout design alternatives. Finally, the detailed steps involved in the layout design generation process were compiled as a process model.