A conceptual model for transformation of bill of materials from offsite manufacturing to onsite construction in industrialized house-building

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Lending inspiration from the manufacturing industry, industrialized house-builders have adopted some of its characteristics such as high standardization of configurable products and manufacturing processes. Standardization of product and information flow within industrialized housebuilding has shown to beneficially increase offsite manufacturing efficiency. They have however not been able to transfer the increase in efficiency to onsite construction, leading to it being one of the key issues resulting in delays. For offsite manufacturing, previous research has suggested Bill of Material (BOM) as a structure to define information for in manufacturing phases. However, due to the variation in workflow between offsite manufacturing and onsite construction, the structure of a BOM for offsite manufacturing cannot be reused in onsite construction, ultimately resulting in increased data redundancy and recreation. A conceptual model of a BOM for onsite construction has been developed inspired by Bill of Materials (BOM), Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Location Breakdown Structure (LBS), Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and Work Instructions (WI). The conceptual model utilizes space structure LBS to link spaces with SOPs. Furthermore, it also utilizes WBS to link SOPs with WIs. The BOM for onsite construction is generated by a transformation from offsite manufacturing P-BOM. Streamlining the information flow and transformation between manufacturing and construction phases open the possibility to develop IT-solutions for industrialized house-builders. By developing existing IT-systems to reduce data redundancy, the fragmentation between offsite manufacturing and construction sites could be utilized by reusing existing data. The conceptual model supports multiple information views and allows for information filtering determined by the performed work and project.