The effect of resource availability on completion time in volume home building

Volume home builders in Australia generally employ specialised subcontractors in their house construction projects which introduces immense coordination and production challenges. One of the challenges is increasing construction completion times due to resource shortage. The volume home building industry is often considered as the part of the construction industry that is very similar to the manufacturing industry. This paper investigates to what extent resource availability affects the completion time of individual houses when the volume home building production system is viewed as a manufacturing production system. To achieve this objective a typical single storey house construction process, which is based on actual data from a large volume home builder in Victoria, is simulated with a number of different resource availability scenarios using discrete event simulation methods. The simulation results demonstrate that the completion times stay relatively stable up to a certain level of resource availability. However, further reduction in resource availability leads to vast increases in completion times. This research shows how simulation methods can be used effectively to predict the effect of resource shortage on the completion time of individual houses