UC Berkeley

Industrialized construction (IC) means many things to many people. It is a concept that has been rediscovered time and again. In recent years, interest in IC has been sparked anew thanks to the promise of increasingly affordable automation, readily available cloud computing, and AI driving innovation in our industry. While jumping on the bandwagon now may be more tempting than ever, individual companies—producers or investors—will want to articulate their rationale for moving towards IC. This rationale will determine what investments are suitable for their circumstances. To illustrate, this paper describes three companies that invested in IC, pursuing a variety of rationales and achieving different levels of success. Acquiring hardware tends to be the easy part. It must be warranted by the company’s production system design(s) founded on operations science principles, and accompanied by people’s know-how and ways of working (company culture and processes). A takeaway from the literature and interviews conducted for this paper is that production system design and operations science are seldom mentioned, yet these are crucially important for company success especially when counting on IC to improve production system performance.