Maturity m easurement for industrialized house building - A study of VeidekkeMAX

Sammanfattning: The construction industry is today well known for its way to work in projects where each one is unique and needs its own detail solutions, ways to work and different processes. That means that in the start up phase of each project there has been a need to start all over again since just a fraction of knowledge and solutions pass from one project to another. Companies has been able to work this way due to the fact that lately the interest level has been favourable and the customers has had a buying power which enable construction to be carried out this way. Today the interest is so low that it cannot almost go any lower and the construction industry is therefore forced to find new ways to build houses more efficiently and cheaper to be able to match the market. The answer to this problem was found in the manufacturing industry and the way they work with repeated processes. The construction industry has looked into manufacturing and their ways of working before when they looked at the car industry in the early 20th century but it took about 100 years from that for the industrialized house building that we know today to be born. One of Scandinavia´s largest construction companies Veidekke is currently putting an effort in developing an industrialized house building concept called VeidekkeMAX that consists of three different areas. The three areas are a technical platform, process and an organisation with the purpose to find more effective ways to construct houses without compromising with the final outputs quality. When the work today is carried out with more repeatable process than before it is possible to measure the development of industrialized house building by looking at the maturity of its processes within the company. This study´s aim is to investigate a maturity measurement tool from the manufacturing industry and use it in the construction industry. This study will measure the maturity of the concept VeidekkeMAX and the measurement tool being used is CMM. CMM was developed in the software industry and it measure maturity in five different levels. It is important that the measurement can be repeated so it is possible to see how the development is going. Specific fields within the concept have been chosen for investigation and the empirics for the study has been collected through interviews with employees in the chosen fields. The respondent’s answers have been evaluated and the result is presented in this paper. The result shows that today the maturity in VeidekkeMAX is low since the employees are working in different ways and the observed processes within the company today are individual and varies a lot. The result also shows that it is possible to use CMM within the construction industry but it is as most useful if there are clear processes to measure. This thesis also briefly investigates the question whether it is possible to take standardisation within the construction industry too far and each interviewed was asked for their opinions on where VeidekkeMAX is going. The result showed that within the company there is a fear to take it one step too far which shows the importance to make sure that every employee is on-board with the change and that everyone is motivated to work with the concept and help develop it making it more efficient.