Supply Chain Management LEAGILE SUPPLY CHAIN FOR AUSTRALIAN INDUSTRIALISED HOUSE BUILDING

ABSTRACT The 2012 Australian National Housing Supply Council (NHSC) reported a constantly growing demand for new houses in many capital cities around Australia. Since then, the supply of housing has not responded commensurately to the growing demand. The residential sector challenges this issue by developing and effectively using new materials, processes, and practices to strengthen their competitive advantage against other construction sectors. This paper gives an overview of the Australian housing supply and demand. House builders have been adopting the idea of producing house modules and elements in factories. Therefore, the house building has been changed from traditional to prefabricated supply chain. Managing the prefabricated houses supply chain is playing an important role in the housing supply. A leagile supply chain is introduced to manage the prefabricated supply chain. It employs material and information decoupling points. Four strategies are introduced to balance the trade-offs between the housing supply and demand. Applying any strategy is guided by the factors affecting the housing supply and demand. The three main factors are the house completion time, cost of finished house, and customer preferences. In this paper, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is introduced as a facilitator to the supply chain strategies selection in the Australian housing industry. The AHP model takes the three factors into account for differentiating between the four supply chain strategies. The model was implemented with the aid of the commercial software package known as Expert Choice © . The results from the AHP model show the benefits of each strategy with respect to the factors tested