The aim of this pilot study was to identify the existing level of digital competence and skills at wooden house manufacturers and to understand the future perceived needs they have in relation to these competences. This is motivated by the acknowledgement that digitalization has been emphasized both as a critical necessity and significant challenge for this industry.

The number of responding companies in the study is rather low, offering a partial snapshot of the current state of the industry and potential future directions. However, it does provide valuable insights and considerations for future strategies for digitalization of the industry.

The wooden house manufacturing industry is facing challenges relating to the overall business cycle as well as the effects of war, inflation, and increased competition. Despite these challenges, the industry appears to be aware of the potential possibilities that digital technologies may offer. Overall, they are rather content with the current level of digitalization and the level of digital competence among their staff. At the same time, they realize the need to continue investing in hardware and software as well as continued enhancement of digital skills for the staff. Presently, only a very small portion of total investments in the industry is allocated to digitalization.

Most companies employ similar technologies and a variety of similar strategies to enhance their competences. The primary focus in terms of digital competence lies in the areas of production, marketing, communication, and sales. Areas such as customer support, decision-making, testing, and certification are not prioritized. Most of these companies recognize the need of digital competence development for their staff to effectively use contemporary digital technologies. Furthermore, they see a growing demand for digital competence over the next three years, particularly in domains such as artificial intelligence (AI), cybersecurity, infrastructure, and social media/marketing.

Vertical integration of supply chains has enabled industrialised house-building companies to develop and use product platforms. Constant changes in the external business environment, such as customer needs, legal requirements and demand fluctuations, continually compel companies to strategically align their product platforms with market position and offering accordingly. Achieving alignment is often hindered by a lack of understanding of the interplay between the external business environment, product platform, offering and market position. The knowledge on product platform alignment in this industry exists in the literature; however, a coherent description of product platform alignment is missing. The aim of this research was, therefore, to expand the knowledge on the strategic aspects of product platforms by describing product platform alignment in industrialised house building. Empirical data were collected in two Swedish companies producing timber-frame single-family houses. The developed model provides a coherent description of product platform alignment via five alignment modes that group interplays between product platform, business model and the external business environment, whereas identified challenges additionally enrich the description. Formalisation of the product platform knowledge and the changeability of manufacturing systems are identified as two main enablers of achieving product platform alignment.

The key driving factors in using humans and robots in collaborativeapplications for assembly processes are to reduce assembly time, cost and toimprove the human working environment from an ergonomic viewpoint. Currently,there are limited automated procedures in assembly operations in house constructionbecause the traditional type of assembly process depends entirely on manpower.This is common in the assembly process in different industries since assembly isone of the most demanding and intense manufacturing processes, and it is difficultto automate. This paper presents a case study on the implementation of human-robotcollaboration for window assembly by way of an offline robot programmingsimulation. A self-adaptive software architecture that runs on a real-time targetmachine is also proposed for robotic window assembly. The window assemblymethod that will be used in this study is called “Click-In” and is manufactured byFixture System Sweden AB. Apart from robot simulations, detailed suggestions aregiven for building a pilot cell for robot window assembly. The case study presentedin this paper has both economical and ergonomic goals. The economic goal is toreduce the assembly time which will lead to an increase in window production. Byintroducing human-robot collaboration, operators do not need to performuncomfortable assembly operations—rather the robot will perform these unergonomic operations. The feasibility of both goals is verified with offline robotprogramming simulation. 

To advance the performance, sustainability and affordability of prefabricated residential construction, it is important that the industry needs, obstacles and perceptions are studied. This study focused on the prefabricated timber housing industry in British Columbia (BC), Canada. A questionnaire was conducted amongst timber prefabrication companies to explore their opportunities, barriers, and perceptions of their situation. Based on a qualitative analysis, the responses were categorised and compared. The results confirmed that the prefabrication industry uses widely varying processes and is operating in a niche market. The biggest challenge identified throughout the study was the lack of skilled and available labour. A low level of automation is most commonly used but there was a trend that higher levels of automation have higher levels of output. Among other aspects, the findings highlighted the opportunities and difficulties in the process from traditional construction to prefabrication. This research contributes to the discourse on the needs of the BC construction industry for developing high performance prefabricated housing. © WCTE 2021. All rights reserved.

In Sweden, wooden single-family houses have been prefabricated for a long time, instead of being built on-site. However, it was mentioned that in several firms, many working tasks just were brought from outside into a manufacturing hall, yet the tasks were not adjusted to utilize potential benefits that prefabrication offers. Production development was not prioritized and thus, the firms’ productivity and efficiency were on a second-rate level, with profitability numbers following accordingly. In the past years, however, and especially related to the rapid development within the areas of digitalization and automation, several firms have been investing into different types of development. As the production of wooden single-family houses is very unstable in the past decade, yet, production costs per m2 more than doubled since 2002 and the industry is characterized of a very high degree of competition, productivity is a key performance indicator (KPI) in this industry.The aim of this study is to investigate in the productivity of Swedish firms producing wooden single-family houses in the past ten years. This is done by using the activity ratio Total Asset Turnover ratio, measuring a firm’s operational efficiency from 2008 to 2017, i.e. the latest data available. For 47 firms, data from annual reports were collected and analyzed.Data shows a productivity loss by 4.7%, aggregated for all firms in the industry. Further, the productivity for individual firms developed very different, varying from +141.7% to -68.4% and it can be concluded that a change in fixed assets affects productivity.

The industrialization of wooden house building processes from traditional on-site production to off-site prefabrication is challenging, concerning the possibility of effective handling of numerous product variants, where each house is more or less unique. To obtain high productivity in the production, a well-balanced flow with minimization of waste is of great importance. In Sweden, many off-site house producers are in the starting phases of introducing advanced automation technologies in their production processes and the need for a more detailed process control therefore increases. In previous studies, the installation of windows has been identified as a demanding step in the prefabrication process, since it often creates a bottleneck i.e. the most overloaded part of process (Slack et al., 2016) and thus negatively affects the cycle-time and a balanced production flow.This study aims to understand, how the effectiveness of windows installations could be improved. By using a multiple case-study methodology, processes of several companies are compared and discussed. Further, suggestions for improvements are made for one case company. The results show that a replacement of the windows installation could (a) shorten the cycle-time of one wall by more than 10 %, (b) reduce the queueing time for the entire wall assembly process by more than 48 % and consequently (c) help to create a more balanced production flow.

In the past decades, the housing shortage in Sweden accumulated to a level that led to acute problems for many people combined with continuously rising housing prices. The market for single-family houses, where wood dominates with 85 – 90 % of market share, is highly competitive with many companies offering relatively similar products or services. To serve the demand on that market, only 38 % of the existing companies were needed. One way to tackle the existing housing shortage, and to develop new business opportunities, could be to get more companies from the single-family house industry to produce multi-family houses. Current competence in prefabricated house production could be utilised, yet, other areas could act as barriers for these companies. The aim of this study is to identify potential market mobility barriers for Swedish companies currently producing wooden single-family houses to develop towards the construction of multi-family houses. This will be conducted by initial interviews with decision makers in those companies, combined with a survey-study covering companies within the industry. The results show that the main market mobility barriers are related to the strong market presence of traditional building materials, lack of knowledge by the market of wood as a suitable building material and the importance of governmental guidance and actions.