Suggestions for innovation in the supplying of joinery products through the application of Lean-thinking and 3-D sensing

Sammanfattning: The supplying of engineer-to-order joinery products to the construction industry is a novel research area in both the wood-related and the construction-related fields. The process of supplying the construction industry with highly refined one-of-a-kind wood products is here examined in order to explore possible process innovations to identify factors contributing to inefficiency, to define areas for innovation to improve industry performance, and to evaluate 3-D sensing technologies as a way of achieving a model-based joinery production. The organizations studied use a mixture of concept-to-order and design-to-order production strategies to produce what in this thesis are called engineer-to-order joinery products.The main consumer of the engineer-to-order joinery products are theconstruction industry, an industry that has been criticized for not keeping upwith other production industries in terms of quality, cost efficiency, innovation,and production methods. The development of Lean production principles andsupply chain management are innovations commonly suggested to increase the degree of industrialization in the construction industry, and this is reflected in the research approach adopted for the work described in this thesis. The conditions for supplying engineer-to-order joinery products to theconstruction industry have been studied and areas for innovation efforts aresuggested. The primary research question has been: Can new technology and new management methods be applied to improve process efficiency and efficacy in the supplying of engineer-to-order joinery products? Lean principles and 3-D sensing are two perspectives chosen to investigate this supply process. The study has used both qualitative and quantitative research methods, with a slight overweight towards the qualitative methods, as the context for the quantitative research has always been in focus. Real-world case studies have been used for the empirical data collection.The results suggest that there is a significant potential for increasing efficiency and efficacy through: greater focus on cross-organisational innovation focusing on higher levels of industrialisation, new forms of contractual relations, supply chain cooperation, improved knowledge-transfer and information management, developing competence on 3-D sensing and “BIM”-modelling, and through organisational consolidation.