Manufactured housing components assembly redesign process and its impact on production process and facility layout

The manufactured housing industry produces one of the most popular factory-built housing, and it has a great potential to meet the increasing demand for affordable housing. However, visit to a manufactured housing factory reveals that the industry's assembly procedure for assembling the manufactured house is still primitive. Therefore, there is a need to introduce advanced and futuristic techniques, and equipments currently used in other progressive manufacturing industries. The overall goal of this research is to show the effect of manufactured housing components assemblies redesign on the productivity of the production process and the material handling cost of the facility layout. In order to accomplish this goal, alternative assembly process for parts of the manufactured housing assembly is developed. The effect of the change in the assembly process is shown on the material handling cost and the productivity with help of FactoryFLOW facility layout software and Arena simulation software. In addition, this research also presents integrated information input-output model, which can be used to integrate the two software. Two approaches for data transfer between the two software are also illustrated and a demonstration example is developed to show the data exchange between the two software by one of the approach.