News
Worldwide Keynote Addresses
Dr. Mullens recently delivered keynote presentations at two international housing conferences. Both presentations focused on the challenges faced by U.S. housing manufacturers as they seek to remain competitive and deliver the highest quality housing at affordable cost.
Mullens, M., " Innovation in the U.S. Industrialized Housing Industry: A Tale of Two Strategies," Keynote presented to the XXXV IAHS World Congress on Housing Science 2007, Melbourne, Australia, September, 2007.
Mullens, M., “Factory Produced Housing in America,” Keynote presentation at 1st International ManuBuild Conference, Rotterdam, April 2007.
The two addresses led to the following journal paper that explores two strategies for productivity improvement in modular homebuilding. The first strategy is extensive automation and the second is lean production. The paper concludes that extensive automation is a risky strategy for an industry subject to wild market swings and that lean production can provide many of the same benefits
Mullens, M., " Innovation in the U.S. Industrialized Housing Industry: A Tale of Two Strategies," International Journal for Housing Science and Its Applications. 32(3)163-178, May 2008. [download paper]
Impact of Product Choice on Lean Homebuilding
We often think that lean production is more difficult to implement as we provide more product choice to our customers. This paper explores the impact of product choice on lean homebuilding, based on results observed when implementing lean in several factories. The paper is a summary of Ms. Nahmens' doctoral dissertation.
Nahmens, I. and M. Mullens, “The Impact of Product Choice on Lean Homebuilding,” Construction Innovation: Information, Process and Management, 9(1)84-100, March 2009. [download paper]
