Supporting smart manufacturing in industrialized house building through product data management

Abstract: Industrialized house building (IHB) needs to improve efficiency and reduce costs to be able to meet the demand of future building requirements. The discrete manufacturing industry has already begun its transformation with concepts such as Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing. The focus of these concepts is on systems integration and utilizing different design principles and technologies to improve productivity and competitiveness. So far, smart manufacturing has not been discussed to any significant extent in the context of the IHB industry, even though it might be a way for this industry to improve efficiency and reduce costs.The purpose of this thesis is to support smart manufacturing realization in the IHB industry through improved systems integration capability. The objective is to develop a support system that helps to mitigate current product data management challenges in the IHB industry. The research presented here followed the design research methodology (DRM), and three research studies were conducted within the IHB industry, specifically within the context of the wooden single-family house industry.The findings emphasized that integrated information and communication technology (ICT) tools are a precondition for realizing smart manufacturing in IHB. A pilot product lifecycle management (PLM) system was developed as a support system to mitigate the challenges encountered in product data management. The support system was developed based on five requirements (integrate product data between ICT tools, extract product data to purchasing items, adaptable to the product realization process, organize product data in different views, and trace revisions on building information modeling (BIM) projects and BIM families) and six functions (extract and interpret product data from the BIM project, property mapping, revision management, different types of document structures, from document structure to item structure, and complete bill of materials). The pilot PLM system was perceived to have value and could, for the case company, mitigate their challenges with product data management and facilitate improved systems integration. Furthermore, 18 enablers for PLM implementation in IHB were identified and categorized into implementing organization, PLM implementation process, PLM system selection and development, and development of product data for PLM.