Oh No! Not another conference about innovation in construction. It seems like everybody that can produce a Powerpoint presentation is speaking about how they can help the building industry be more innovative and disruptive. Each of them knows what is best for your struggling business.
Innovation means doing or creating something that is new (expensive) in order to grow, keep up with competition, or be groundbreaking construction industry leaders.
Yes, there are some innovative ideas that look very good and even some factories beginning to implement these sometimes disruptive ideas but only time will tell if they will be successful.
One of the first things all those building industry speakers want you to know about is a huge market for affordable housing in the US. They bring out statistics showing how big this market is now and what they believe are its future needs.
They talk about innovative ways to build product to relieve this backlog of housing. They even offer to work with businesses that want to open modular or prefab factories to build affordable housing and there is a boatload of investors waiting to jump into this arena who have no idea of what is needed to accomplish it.
Modular construction is the new buzzword for solving this problem.
However one part of the construction doesn’t need innovation as much as it needs improvement….the custom modular housing industry.
Improvement, or process improvement, refers to looking at how something is done – the steps, roles, and materials used – and making it more effective and efficient and that is what is needed in the current modular housing industry.
This smaller part of the modular industry, the custom modular home factory, can’t be innovative like those industry speakers say they should. In fact, Innovation could actually kill the custom modular home market.
Custom modular industry can be found throughout the US but the largest concentration of factories producing these custom homes is found in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions of the country.
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| photo courtesy of Westchester Modular Homes |
They produce some of the most beautiful modular homes in the world. Their builders know that they can order just about anything the customer wants and at least one of these factories can usually produce it. That’s just the name of the game in custom modular.
Recently modular home builders have contacted me about problems they are encountering with their factories. Things like delays getting homes on the production schedule, climbing transportation costs, poor quality control, out of control service costs, labor and subcontractor shortages, increased government regulations and even the use of the term “modular” itself.
Innovation may not help any of these areas in custom modular production but ‘improvement’ can.
Instead of custom modular factories and their builders looking for that next big innovation that will solve all their problems, maybe we should be looking at what needs improved in our processes.
First, improvements are a lot less money intensive and secondly, somewhere somebody has probably found a way to improve one or more of these areas and you just need to find out who.
ATTENTION BUILDERS: Not every custom home factory has a huge backlog. There are factories that are running at near capacity that have already “improved” their scheduling and production allowing them to be more efficient.
Transportation costs climbing for everyone but there are small improvements out there of even this area.
Poor quality control in the factory and increasing service and repair costs are open to massive amounts of improvements. Efficiency and quality can go hand in hand in modular housing. It used to be there but for some reason it has gone a little off the track for our industry lately. Again, there are factories with low callbacks and few service problems. We should all share these improvements. This is something that cannot be cured by expensive innovation but it can be eradicated by using good old common sense and sitting down and figuring it out together like our industry used to do.
As for those overwhelming government regulations, we have the Modular Home Builders Association (MHBA) on our side. For some reason the MHBA loves to dive into new government regulations affecting our industry and working with each individual state code office to find ways to streamline the process. If you haven’t join the MHBA yet, you should do it today.
Maybe custom modular home factories need to dust off the old “Suggestion Box”, sit down with their production, engineering people and sales staff and begin actually listening to the people that design, order products, build the homes and service them after the sale.
These are the people with their hands touching the homes the factory builds and if anyone really knows where the problems are, they do.
Remember, most Innovation is expensive and unproven while Improvement is affordable and quicker to implement.
If your factory is ready to look into making improvements and would like some help implementing the information gathering process, drop me a line at [email protected].
