The design process has a significant impact on the performance and profitability of a housing project. Therefore, decisions made during the design process should take into consideration knowledge and experience from other processes in previously accomplished projects, specifically from the production phase. How to capture and use production experience in housing has not gained enough interest, possibly leading to suboptimal improvements during the construction process. This motivates research on how onsite production experience from similar previous projects can be captured and used to improve constructability without risking customer values. Based on the concept of constructability, 'design for manufacturing and assembly' and the theory of waste, the method 'design for construction' (DFC) has been developed. The four-step model complements the conventional construction process, and consists of the following steps: (1) specify customer values and similar previous projects; (2) identify onsite waste and cost drivers in previous projects; (3) develop criteria to evaluate constructability; and (4) evaluate constructability of the design. The DFC method is exemplified and tested through a case study, in which it was shown that the method facilitated identification of all problems that were considered in the investigated project. The method also highlighted other project obstacles that potentially could have been solved to improve constructability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.