New digital services for end customer - mass customization as a game changer

The construction industry has major problems linked to productivity, technical and architectural quality, gender equality and work environment, crime and environmental impacts.

These problems are important challenges for achieving sustainable community building.For society, one question is thus how today´s needs and problems as well as society´s new sustainability requirements and the resident´s ability to pay can be met.Evaluations conducted by Smart Built Environment show that a system shift together with the climate issue are the biggest challenges the community building sector has.

A system shift that is often linked, among other things, to reduced fragmentation, a coherent process from design to construction to reuse, digitization and business models.The Japanese residential industry was restructured between 1960 and 1990 and developed construction with experience from other industries, partly as mass production of fixed traditional prefabricated modules and partly as flexible customized system deliveries based on the first steps to mass customization.Almost all other manufacturing industries nowadays apply the principles of mass customization with the same manufacturing cost as mass production.

At the same time, mass customization means, among other things, a higher flexibility in production with easier adaptation to variations in demand, as well as the opportunity for individual customization and customer participation in product determination in a life cycle perspective.In the report from Smart Built Environment "Digitalization-driven values and business models in the ecosystem of the built environment sector: A detailed future scenario" (2023) distinguishes between the values of the physical product that traditional community building actors focus on, and the process values and new business models based on the data created by digitalization.The report states that traditional community building actors are only at the beginning of a projected transformation period of up to 20-years.

Instead, the options for a System shifting be new "game changers" and software vendors, as has happened in other sectors´ transformation, creating value through data.Based on the above, the application intends to apply Software as a Service (SaaS) via user tests, which means that a supplier provides product information as a payment service via the internet.The application relates directly to the purpose and assessment criteria of the call.

The purpose is to investigate in a limited application what the technology can provide and how user value the offer.The project questions some of the sector´s traditional truths and should be seen as an alternative to the sector´s focus today on fragmentization, BIM and prefabrication.The proposal is innovative, and enables a unique application that is internationally scalable.

The application is also an alternative way to accelerate the nedded system shift.