Opportunities and challenges to mass customise low-income housing in Brazil

Mass Customization (MC) stands for the ability to develop high value-added products within short time frames and at relatively low costs. Although this strategy has been successfully applied in several industries, in construction it has been mostly limited to a few companies that produce factory-built and manufactured homes. In Brazil, where traditional construction techniques are majorly adopted in low-income housing programs, there have been many critics regarding the excessive standardization and thus, non-consideration of the increasing diversity of households and their specific needs. Such standardization is mainly due to the use of mass production core ideas as a way to achieve low costs. The aim of this paper was then to explore the possibilities of adopting mass customization in this context. Two existing low-income housing programs in Brazil were investigated. The discussion on the opportunities and challenges to introduce mass customization ideas in these programs are based on the analysis of the product development process, as well as an analysis of household profiles and needs. The results indicated that the household profile is very diverse in low-income housing. Thus, demand for customization is high, as well as attributed to different products’ characteristics. However, the product development process in this context was found to be very different from a process of mass customized products. Despite the need to modify such process, it was identified that mass customization can be achieved in a variety of ways, and does not necessarily imply on the modernization of construction techniques. However, a major challenge for achieving higher customization in this context seems to be related to the programs’ rules and how it restraints innovation and diversity. Keywords: product development process, low-income housing, mass customization, value managemen

Modularization Assessment of Product Architecture

Modularization refers to the opportunity for mixing-and-matching of components in a modular product design in which the standard interfaces between components are specified to allow for a range of variation in components to be substituted in a product architecture. It is through mixing-and-matching of these components, and how these components interface with one another, that new systems are created. Consequently, the degree of modularization inherent in a system is highly dependent upon the components and the interface constraints shared among the components, modules, and sub-systems. In this paper, a mathematical model is derived for analyzing the degree of modularization in a given product architecture by taking into consideration the number of components, number of interfaces, the composition of new-to-the-firm (NTF) components, and substitutability of components. An analysis of Chrysler windshield wipers controller suggests that two product architectures may share similar interface constraints, but the opportunity for modularization of one module is significant higher than the other due to the higher substitutability of its components and lower composition of NTF components.Product architecture, modularization, substitutability, new product development

Selling Technology: The Changing Shape of Sales in an Information Economy

[Excerpt] This book describes and explains the changing nature of sales through the daily experiences of salespeople, engineers, managers, and purchasing agents who construct markets for emergent technologies through their daily engagement in sales interactions… [It] provides a grounded empirical account of sales work in an area that has been the subject of insufficient study, namely contemporary industrial markets where firms trade with other firms

Modular assembly with postponement to improve health, safety & productivity in construction

This paper presents the outcome of an engineering study as part of the design and development of a lean and agile construction system and in particular its supply chain component. This combines modular assembly with a postponement function to be tested on a case study project (not reported here), the objective of which is to improve health, safety and productivity for the company sponsoring the research. The contribution to research is the combination of countermeasures described in this paper that have been developed and incorporated into a wider construction system, in the same way that manufacturing has used this strategy with great success. Also, a further output is the development and use of an innovative method for assembling, transporting and installing mechanical and electrical modules, whereby modularization can be achieved with or without offsite manufacturing capability. The research forecasts a reduction of onsite labor of 35% compared to using traditional methods of construction, with less onsite operatives at risk of injury carrying out simpler assembly tasks within ergonomic mobile work cells. Further research is proposed to measure the benefits of the construction system following its implementation on a case study project

Introduction to the theoretical and philosophical basis of modern management

This “Introduction to the theoretical and philosophical basis of modern management” was developed, maintained and expanded by Professor Patrick Boylan between 1992 and 2004 to support teaching on the City University MA Courses in Arts Management, Museum and Gallery Management and Arts Management in Education in what was then the Department of Arts Policy and Management. From 1995 it was also made available on the Department’s resources website, formerly at http://www.city.ac.uk/artspol/, but soon became used much more widely by other institutions and courses to support their own students, particularly after it received a “Best of the Web” Award for Management Education in 1995. By request it was also it was also added to the learning resources website of the International Council of Museums’ International Committee for the Training of Personnel (ICOM-ICTOP). Since the Arts Policy and Management website was finally discontinued following recent major changes in the University’s structure there have been a number of requests from other institutions and individuals who still find the original text of value, it is now being made publicly available again, this time in PDF format, through the University’s new institutional repository, City Research Online: http://www.city.ac.uk/research/research-publications

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Many capital good firms deliver products that are not strictly one-off, but instead share a certain degree of similarity with other deliveries. In the delivery of the product, they aim to balance stability and variety in their product design and processes. The issue of engineering change plays an important in how they manage to do so. Our aim is to gain more understanding into how capital good firms manage engineering change, design variety and process variety, and into the role of the product delivery strategies they thereby use. Product delivery strategies are defined as the type of engineering work that is done independent of an order and the specification freedom the customer has in the remaining part of the design. Based on the within-case and cross-case analysis of two capital good firms several mechanisms for managing engineering change, design variety and process variety are distilled. It was found that there exist different ways of (1) managing generic design information, (2) isolating large engineering changes, (3) managing process variety, (4) designing and executing engineering change processes. Together with different product delivery strategies these mechanisms can be placed within an archetypes framework of engineering change management. On one side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to open product delivery strategies, have some practices in place to investigate design reuse potential, isolate discontinuous engineering changes into the first deliveries of the product, employ ‘probe and learn’ process management principles in order to allow evolving insights to be accurately executed and have informal engineering change processes. On the other side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to a closed product delivery strategy, focus on prevention of engineering changes based on design standards, need no isolation mechanisms for discontinuous engineering changes, have formal process management practices in place and make use of closed and formal engineering change procedures. The framework should help managers to (1) analyze existing configurations of product delivery strategies, product and process designs and engineering change management and (2) reconfigure any of these elements according to a ‘misfit’ derived from the framework. Since this is one of the few in-depth empirical studies into engineering change management in the capital good sector, our work adds to the understanding on the various ways in which engineering change can be dealt with

Modeling the Portfolio of Capabilities for Product Variant Creation and Assessment

Choice navigation, solution space development and robust process design are the three mass customization key competences. The first and second are often mapped into product configuration or design automation systems and aim at specifying or co-designing a suitable product variant. Robust process design targets at managing a well-known but flexible supply network. As part of this, the portfolio of capabilities describes limitations to the solution space and is a valuable source of knowledge containing general design guidelines and specific manufacturing restrictions, like NC travelling distances, as well as availabilities of whole production processes. This article contributes a modeling approach that bridges solutions space development and modeling the portfolio of capabilities. Therefore, a knowledge-based engineering system is extended by a capability model of according production machines that allows to automatically check new product variants against the portfolio of capabilities and to estimate setup efforts and expenses of process changes

The 8th flow - common understanding

Projects are a form of engineered-to-order (ETO) production which require that the definition of Value becomes part of the production process. Project production requires the inclusion of the product design, the design process, and the production process to be integrated in order to fully benefit from waste reduction and process improvement. In construction, project production is more challenging because of the temporal, transient, and fragmented nature of the project team and the supporting supply chain. This requires a form of ‘interoperability’ between the supply chain organisations, the particular teams involved, the commissioning clients and other stakeholders. It is proposed that this ‘interoperability’ is a form of common understanding and that this understanding needs to be defined, developed, and nurtured across the project execution as a flow in the same way that other flows are managed. Building on the seven flow model proposal reported by Koskela and Howell (1999), this paper proposes a common understanding as an eighth flow and suggests how it might be managed. The paper classifies the concept of common understanding as a soft flow and shows that although it is a fresh insight it actually has roots in lean production. The identity of common understanding as the eighth flow arises from a number of funded research projects in which the difficulties of lean construction implementation were investigated

A modular-based approach for Just-In-Time Specification of customer orders in the aircraft manufacturing industry

The demand for flexibility in the configuration of highly customized capital goods such as aircrafts is rising. Customers request specifying product options later than required by the currently defined order fulfilment process of the OEM. However, late changes of previously configured products can cause disturbances in global production networks. In this paper, a modular-based approach is presented, allowing customers to specify options just-in-time depending on the respective lead times following an Engineer/Order-to-order (EOTO) strategy. The concept of Just-In-Time Specification with its respective phases of order specification and steps of production planning is described and applied to the aircraft manufacturing industry