Productivity of Firms in the Swedish Industry for Wooden Single-Family Houses

In Sweden, wooden single-family houses have been prefabricated for a long time, instead of being built on-site. However, it was mentioned that in several firms, many working tasks just were brought from outside into a manufacturing hall, yet the tasks were not adjusted to utilize potential benefits that prefabrication offers. Production development was not prioritized and thus, the firms’ productivity and efficiency were on a second-rate level, with profitability numbers following accordingly. In the past years, however, and especially related to the rapid development within the areas of digitalization and automation, several firms have been investing into different types of development. As the production of wooden single-family houses is very unstable in the past decade, yet, production costs per m2 more than doubled since 2002 and the industry is characterized of a very high degree of competition, productivity is a key performance indicator (KPI) in this industry.The aim of this study is to investigate in the productivity of Swedish firms producing wooden single-family houses in the past ten years. This is done by using the activity ratio Total Asset Turnover ratio, measuring a firm’s operational efficiency from 2008 to 2017, i.e. the latest data available. For 47 firms, data from annual reports were collected and analyzed.Data shows a productivity loss by 4.7%, aggregated for all firms in the industry. Further, the productivity for individual firms developed very different, varying from +141.7% to -68.4% and it can be concluded that a change in fixed assets affects productivity