Production strategies for pre-engineering in house-building: exploring product development platforms

Construction is a trade where the dominating production strategy is engineer-to-order. House-builders can pre-engineer their design to different degrees, resulting in variations of the engineer-to-order strategy: design-to-order, adapt-to-order, and engineer-to-stock. This variation causes different settings for the use of platforms in house-building. The aim of this research is to diversify the engineer-to-order production strategy and its consequences for platform organization by studying its use in house-building. The multiple case study on four engineering/contractor firms reports the core capabilities for engineer-to-order firms: procurement and tendering, market knowledge, engineering, multi-skilled manufacturing, and coordination of sales and manufacturing. Design-to-order, adapt-to-order and engineer-to stock were shown to be production strategies in use in house-building. In design-to-order platforms parts of the platform are undefined while engineer-to-stock platforms are fully predefined. Coordination between market and manufacturing is a crucial capability when engaging in platform organization. When an engineering firm and a contractor collaborate to fulfil client needs, the coordination capability between market and manufacturing was shown to be low. The case study shows that specialized contractors who integrate the supply chain towards a specific market segment benefit fully from the platform concept, while contractors with a wider scope could focus on standardization of processes rather than products.