Month: January 2022

Construction Management Introduction 2

            If new houses cannot be debugged as a group on a mass-production assembly-line at a single factory location, like other products, then the only other option left is to debug each new single-family house and each new tract housing project individually one at a time. 

            This requires an applicable database of information consisting of illustrations and descriptions of past problems…universally generic to housing construction overall plus company-specific issues…to use before and during the construction…to replace the initial trial-runs that typically take place on mass-production assembly-lines.

            This approach also aims to reduce the negative impact of isolated housing construction projects regarding the communication of debugging information within the industry.

            This impact fosters the jealously guarded competitive advantage of expertise that belongs to builders, architects, interior designers, building trade subcontractors, tradespersons, and field superintendents…that comprises their hard-earned good reputation for producing high-quality work through mistake-avoidance.

            But a new direction requires the recognition that debugging and quality go together to produce high-quality outcomes.

Construction Management Introduction 1

            Mass-production assembly-lines that are manufacturing 100,000 units of the same identical product at a single factory location, for example, thoroughly debug the manufacturing process ahead of time at the initial trial-run phase to ensure a smooth and error-free assembly once mass-production begins. 

            This enables each product to be manufactured at its lowest cost-per-unit.

            One condition for the mass-production of a large number of the same repetitive product at one assembly-line factory is that the finished size of the product must be small enough to be assembled at one location and then shipped/transported to other locations.

            In the exceptional cases of manufactured things that are very large in size, they have the required feature of mobility…of being able to independently transport themselves by land, sea, or air. 

            A navy aircraft carrier is built in a shipyard dry-dock, and when completed is lowered into the water and sailed off to its fleet destination. 

            A jet passenger airliner is assembled inside a hangar, and then rolled outside when completed, fueled-up, and flown into service. 

            A city bus is likewise assembled indoors in a factory, is rolled outside, is fueled-up, and then driven on the highways to its destination of use. 

            New houses are also mass-produced items, but are physically too large and heavy to be fully assembled at one factory location and then transported overland to individual building sites. 

            This reality requires houses to be individually assembled piece-by-piece on geographically isolated sites spread-out all over the countryside…thus breaking up the traditional assembly-line debugging process into literally tens of thousands of separate, disconnected units.

            New housing construction projects are so isolated in terms of communicating common debugging information that two similar projects going up side-by-side on adjacent sites, built by different companies, can each be making some of the same costly mistakes without either one knowing about or being able to benefit from the other’s experience.

            The result is that hundreds of thousands of builders, architects, engineers, interior designers, subcontractors, and individual tradespersons find themselves on the uphill slope of the learning curve repeating many of the same hard-earned lessons.

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