Challenges and critical success factors for the design phase in Swedish industrialised house building

The house building industry has been characterised as less productive with challenging and numerous activities including complex integration process. For the last 20 years,  Industrialized house building has gained research and industry attention and identified as a potential way to improve overall house building productivity. In the whole process, the design phase has been identified as a bottleneck with several disciplines which have to be coordinated to generate a design solution to meet various customers and market requirements. Many aspects of a building's performance depend on the decisions taken in the early design process. These decisions can have  substantial impact on the overall design, lead time, cost and quality of the final product. However, there are many other important factors which need to be considered by designers during the design phase. Less attention has been paid to the identification of these  factors within  the design phase of Industrialized house building. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and outline the critical factors to be considered in the design phase of the industrialised house building. A qualitative research was conducted in combination with literature reviews and multiple case studies linking three Swedish house building companies. Empirical data were gathered from 20 semi-structured interviews. The study identified common challenges in the industry and 21 critical factors that should be addressed in the design phase. The result shows that many challenges identified from this study could be mitigated by developing a platform based product development approach with support tools and methods for these critical factors.