Alternative courses of action for industrialized construction processes in small and medium-sized enterprises

Industrialized construction is always put for-ward as a magic formula when problems in the construction industry reach life-threatening proportions. The use of computer-aided production technologies and standardised products is supposed to provide the solution to many problems, and yet the fact is ignored that the problems are due to fundamental structural deficits in the construction industry, which cannot be resolved so simply The past has shown that attempts to apply industrialized techniques to construction have failed repeatedly, as production has always been placed at the forefront of these efforts. Therefore, the Swiss Contractors' Association and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich have implemented a research project to study industrialized construction from the point of view of the contractor, and to use the term to encompass both process engineering and strategic approaches. This paper presents the developed alternative courses of action for industrialized construction in small and medium-sized enterprises as well as supplementary tools for the company-specific evaluation of the same and their implementation.