Abstract
The Australian house building industry has been facing an increase in the average house completion time in the last decade. This increase in some states is quite dramatic. For instance, Western Australia has faced a 70 percent increase in the average house completion time during this period. This paper uses two planning approaches to explain this; i) the activity-based planning methods and ii) the workflow-based planning methods. In addition, this research investigates the strengths and weaknesses of these two planning approaches in explaining the behaviour of the house building industry. For this purpose, a national case study and five state case studies including Victoria, Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia have been used. The data related to the key parameters have been collected and their correlation with the average house completion time has been investigated. These key parameters include the average house floor area, the number of house completions and the number of houses under construction. The reasons for the increasing trend of the average house completion time have been postulated in all case studies. According to this research, the increase in the average house completion time cannot be explained using activity-based planning methods. In contrast, by using workflow-based planning methods, it has been shown that the average house completion time is correlated with the number of houses under construction. This paper shows that the average completion time is influenced directly by the workflow in the house building industry and that workflow planning should be the basis for the house building industry planning.
Highlights
Completion time of a construction project is always a major concern for all stakeholders
The construction industry has maintained a more-or-less constant production rate while the completion time has been increasing dramatically. This refutes the proposition suggested by activity-based planning methods, which suggests that the increase of the average house completion time can be the result of the loss in the industry’s production rate
The cycle time of these products represents house completion time and the work in process, houses under construction. With these definitions and knowing that the cycle time is influenced by the work in process, it can be concluded that according to the workflow planning method the completion time is influenced by the number of houses under construction
Summary
Completion time of a construction project is always a major concern for all stakeholders. The Australian National Housing Supply Council (2010) in its state of supply report described the factors affecting supply of new dwellings as the construction cost, infrastructure costs, land availability, land release and development processes In this approach, the quality of supply and the circumstances within the house building industry are ignored. Building on Bashford et al.’s (2005) work, this research seeks reasons behind the increase of the average house completion time in Australia For this purpose activity-based and workflow-based planning approaches were considered and their respective weaknesses and strengths demonstrated. The construction industry has maintained a more-or-less constant production rate while the completion time has been increasing dramatically This refutes the proposition suggested by activity-based planning methods, which suggests that the increase of the average house completion time can be the result of the loss in the industry’s production rate.
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