Product Modularity, Tolerance Management, and Visual Management: Potential Synergies

Product Modularity refers to the hierarchical partitioning of products into their
constitutive components. This concept has been explored in manufacturing to ease product design, simplify production, and to efficiently provide variety. Efforts have been made to transfer this knowledge to the construction context (i.e. one-off products, temporary supply chain, production taking place inside the product), especially to support the latter goal: variety. Yet, it is argued that a re-conceptualization of building design and production is required for the successful application of modularization. That is, materials and components used to erect a building should be grouped (at least conceptually) as families of modules and work (production tasks) has to be structured according to such organization. This paper explores the synergies among Product Modularity, Tolerance Management, and Visual Management to improve and ease the understanding of such reconceptualization in design and production. It also examines patterns from the theoretical background of Design for Behaviour Change, and how these can be adapted to embed information in modules and present tolerance data in design drawings.