Edited by: Zhen Chen, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
Reviewed by: Nadia Margaret Anderson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States; Thomas Bock, Technical University of Munich, Germany
This article was submitted to Construction Management, a section of the journal Frontiers in Built Environment
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Mass customization is a manufacturing paradigm that enables customized and personalized design at a cost near mass production. Mass customization's ability to lower unit cost, increase quality, and shorten project duration for customized offerings is considered highly relevant for tomorrow's house building industry. Therefore, through a literature review, this research investigates state-of-the-art in mass customization in the house building industry from four perspectives: (1) mass customization in the house building industry, (2) modular and off-site construction, (3) construction supply chains, and (4) customer satisfaction. It is concluded that a great potential exists for applying mass customization in the house building industry. However, despite its potential, research on mass customization in the house building industry is sparse. In particular, research on developing the solution space and choice navigation tools is limited in this industry.
Cross-coordination in engineer-to-order industries such as shipbuilding and construction was, for some time, considered of significant importance to avoid budget overruns, deadline escalation, and insufficient quality (Mello et al.,
During the first half of the twentieth century, attempts were made to introduce and implement industrialization techniques in the construction industry to produce family houses and apartments. According to Sacks and Partouche (
Mass customization is a business strategy combining the opposing production theories mass production and customization. Mass customization is taking its point of departure in economics of scale using mass production to produce units at a low cost while at the same time allowing flexibility and individual customization of the product (Barman and Canizares,
To approach mass customization and avoid pitfalls, Gilmore and Pine (
Franke et al. (
Contradictory to the positive effects of mass customization, such as increased flexibility and efficiency, Huang et al. (
According to Barman and Canizares (
A good example of mass customization in the house building industry is from a construction company located in the northern part of Denmark. The company, among others, produces social housing, which is made of standard modules containing, for example, a kitchen or a bathroom. The modules are produced off-site and afterwards assembled into one complete house on-site. In these social housing projects, several identical houses are produced. The houses have standard layouts as regards placement of kitchen, bathroom, wardrobe, and technical room; however, the partition of bedrooms is flexible and is not determined beforehand. This means that the customers can customize this part of the interior layout of the individual houses according to their individual needs after the on-site assembly of the standardized modules and in that way obtain a customized interior layout.
Research on and application of mass customization in the construction and house building industry are sparse (Nielsen et al.,
The article is structured as follows: In section Research Methodology, the applied research methodology is presented; section Results presents the results of the literature review; and lastly, in section Discussion, findings are discussed and future research directions are presented.
This section presents the applied research methodology for the literature review. The literature was retrieved in three phases. First, a literature search was conducted in 2016; afterwards, revisions from experts implied additional research to be included in the research; and lastly, it was determined to update the research to include the most recent publications in the field. The literature search procedure is described in detail in this section.
To ensure that the process of conducting the literature review was effective and resulted in providing a firm foundation to the research field (Levy and Ellis,
The starting point for this literature review was taken in 63 articles, which the authors were familiar with from previous research and which had topics that were considered relevant for this research. Based on the 63 articles, a draft was derived for relevant keywords to use in the literature search. The keywords represented mass customization or off-site construction because off-site construction is a prerequisite for introducing industrialization to the industry (Gann,
The search string was searched in Web of Science. The results were limited to topics relevant for the research area, for example, engineering civil, management, engineering manufacturing, and operations research management science, whereas topics that had no relevance to the topic were excluded. These were, among others, telecommunications, engineering chemical, physics applied, and veterinary sciences. The search was furthermore restricted to journal articles. Based on titles, the remaining search hits were reviewed, which resulted in 77 relevant peer-reviewed journal articles. From these 77 articles, new keywords were made, and a second search string was derived, as follows:
This search string was searched in Web of Science, SpringerLink, and Scopus. The results were limited to publications in research areas relevant to the literature review and journal articles as previously described. The outcome of the search was additional 142 peer-reviewed journal articles. Including the initial 63 pre-identified articles, 282 peer-reviewed articles were identified in total after the first step of the literature search. The 282 articles were afterwards reviewed on the basis of title to identify duplicates and assess the articles' relevance to the research area. This resulted in eliminating 43 articles from the initial 282. Based on a review of abstracts of the remaining 239 articles to assess the context of the articles, 48 articles, and three additional duplicates were eliminated. The final number of articles included in this research was found in three steps. First, the 188 articles found through the literature search were assessed in regard to their relevance to the research area. Only research with utmost relevance was included, which resulted in 66 articles being selected for this research. Afterwards, expert inputs were provided, which implied that related research from other geographical areas presented in five journal articles was included, which increased the number of articles to 71. Lastly, it was determined to conduct a forward search of the 71 articles to make the research presented in this article up-to-date. Therefore, articles published between 2016 and 2019 referring to the 71 articles were checked for relevance. This search implied additional 20 articles to be included in the literature review, which means that this literature review is based on 91 articles in total. The number of articles identified in each step is summarized in
Article identification phases.
Previous research | 63 |
First search string | 140 |
Second search string | 282 |
Title review | 239 |
Abstract review | 188 |
Relevant to research area | 66 |
Expert input | 71 |
Forward search | 91 |
To map the existing body of knowledge and construct a discussion and a synthesis in the output stage, the identified 91 articles were categorized into four research areas: (1) mass customization in the house building industry, (2) modular and off-site construction, (3) construction supply chains, and (4) customer satisfaction.
The articles were analyzed on the basis of the previously described four categories. Together, the analyses of the four research areas aim to establish an understanding of state-of-the-art research on mass customization in the house building industry. As mass customization is an interdisciplinary research field, it is highly relevant to include diverse research foci like design, operations management, or supply chain management to expose the potential for utilizing mass customization in the house building industry. The analysis results for each of the four categories are presented in the following.
Production in the house building industry is, according to Roy et al. (
According to Frutos and Borenstein (
Thuesen and Hvam (
The automotive industry has been through a process in which lean production principles were gradually adopted and is now moving toward mass customization as the next paradigm (Benros and Duarte,
The analysis of the articles categorized as “modular and off-site construction” is presented in this section. Modular and off-site construction refers to constructions that are modular and/or produced off-site. The content of the articles has been divided into three additional topics: definition, historical description, and pros and cons of modular and off-site construction. Through these topics, state-of-the-art research on modular and off-site construction is accounted for.
Off-site production is an increasingly applied technique that moves on-site production to a controlled, stable factory environment (Arashpour et al.,
Höök and Stehn (
Numerous off-site production techniques are used in the construction industry today. The applied technique depends on project requirements and conditions such as climate protection, labor skills, quality level, and transportation of elements (Richard,
Off-site production techniques and their definitions.
Modularization | “… the preconstruction of a complete system away from the job site that is then transported to the site. The modules are large in size and possibly may need to be broken down in to several smaller pieces for transport …” | Haas et al., |
Module | “A module is physically manifested as a construction unit that is part of a wider system, which can be integrated through pre-planned interfaces. These physical modules are the result of, and can facilitate, modularization in different phases of the project. They may be considered at different hierarchical levels within the overall product architecture, may be manufactured on or off-site, and can be volumetric or non-volumetric.” | Gosling et al., |
Off-site construction | “… the manufacture and pre-assembly of component, elements or modules before installation into their final location …” | Goodier and Gibb, |
Pre-assembly | “… a process by which various materials, pre-fabricated components, and/or equipment are joined together at a remote location for subsequent installation as a unit …” | Tatum et al., |
Prefabrication | “… a manufacturing process, generally taking place at a specialized facility, in which various materials are joined to form a component part of a final installation …” | Tatum et al., |
Standardization | “… standardization is the use of the same component in multiple products and is closely linked to product variety.” | Ulrich, |
Industrialized housing | “… production in a closed factory environment where only assembly is performed at the construction site, with one evident process owner and a clear product goal of repetition in housing design and production …” | Höök and Stehn, |
The idea of using industrialized pre-fabrication for family housing is not new. Over the last century, both private- and public-funded examples of pre-fabricated projects produced with the diverse techniques are seen frequently (Anson et al.,
According to Gann (
The critique and skepticism of using modular and off-site construction are until today very common. However, Mahapatra et al. (
Several studies such as Gibb and Isack (
Through modular housing designs, construction companies can use industrialization techniques and thus utilize the benefits of industrialization without compromising the opportunity to customize the offering to the customer. However, to exploit the benefits of industrialization, it is necessary to move the production off-site as is also seen in the manufacturing industry (Gann,
According to Pan et al. (
The benefits of using modular and off-site construction techniques depend according to Blismas et al. (
Despite the many advantages of modular and off-site construction, there are also some downsides (Jiang et al.,
Song et al. (
Jaillon and Poon (
Construction companies planning to use customer choices to compete in the market need to rethink the organization as a total process where the customer order decoupling point and its effect on the supply chain should be considered (Barlow et al.,
The existing use of supply chain management in the construction industry shares many similarities with that of other engineer-to-order industries such as shipbuilding, oil and gas, and aerospace. According to Mello et al. (
The supply chain in the construction industry is very fragmented, and its procurement models reduce the level of collaboration and innovation. This means that, in general, the maturity level of supplier management in the construction industry is low (Liu et al.,
A consequence of using pre-assembly construction and mass customization is that customer satisfaction and project success become more complex to measure than are engineer-to-order construction projects. Generally, construction project success is reached when a project is completed according to contract-agreed deadline and budget, within specifications, and with customer satisfaction (Nguyen et al.,
Until today, the house building industry primarily relies on monotonous design that does not necessarily fulfill customer demand and expectations (Lee and Ha,
The aim of this research was to explore existing research on mass customization in the house building industry to identify gaps in the research area and thereby identify potential research directions. Therefore, a three-stage literature review was applied to review state-of-the-art literature. The findings of the literature review clearly indicate that there exists a potential for utilizing mass customization in the house building industry owing to mass customization's ability to lower unit costs, increase quality, and shorten project duration, while at the same time allowing customization. However, research on mass customization as a business strategy within the house building industry is scarce and therefore a highly unexplored research field.
Mass customization is considered relevant to apply in the construction industry to improve today's house production. Concurrently, automation technologies are emerging to support the industrialization of house production (Bock,
Much of the existing research on mass customization in the house building industry is related to case studies, planning activities, and mass customization as a strategy. However, as previously described, companies must develop three fundamental, operational capabilities to become a mass customizer, which are solution space development, robust process design, and choice navigation. Therefore, research related to the three capabilities is considered relevant to the research field. When analyzing the identified literature, it is found that robust process design is the most studied capability, whereas research on solution space development and choice navigation is scarce. Therefore, future research should investigate these two capabilities further to support the implementation and operationalization of mass customization in the house building industry.
Based on the findings of this literature review, it can be concluded that history has implied that customers' perception of industrialized housing is negative. Despite this, industrialization techniques have been proven to, among others, improve quality and decrease construction time, waste, and costs in the house building industry. Through the findings of the literature review, a potential for applying mass customization in the house building industry has been proven. However, as the findings also show, the potential is at present unexploited. Several challenges for implementing mass customization in the house building industry have been identified. One of the identified challenges is the requirement for changing the supply chain setup. At the moment, supply chains in the house building industry are structured to fit engineer-to-order building projects and thus lack standards necessary to cope with builders and suppliers of mass-customized offerings. Another identified challenge is to align what customers want with the internal capabilities of the company, that is, to define the solution space offered to customers.
ML, JL, and SL have in collaboration conducted the literature review. TB and KN have contributed through supervision.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.