In the ideal world we plan our work, then we carefully carry out those plans, and we have no problems. Perhaps you have noticed that it is not an ideal world. In fact it is very doubtful that we will ever experience such utopia in this life. Be that as it may, we all do the best we can with what we have and learn to live with the results. When we make our own mistakes we can plan to change something so that next time we will not have to go through the same troubles again. What about when we "inherit" problems that we must deal with but have no control over preventing them? Will we have to live dealing with the mistakes of others and never be able to prevent their occurrence?

In the manufactured housing installation business this is a way of life. Any problems occurring in the factory and not detected and corrected before shipment will have to be taken care of by the set-up crew. The factory will probably reimburse him for his labors but waiting for drywall patching to dry does not produce the same income for the installer as setting up the home. In that respect installers are losing money every time they have to patch a bunch of cracks due to shipping or some other reason totally out of their control. For the foreseeable future installers will have to do this work because there is no one else to take care of it. Must it always be this way?

It is very difficult to conceive that this industry produces 30+% of all the new housing in the nation with the degree of infrastructure and sophistication that we have. There are less than a dozen people in the entire manufactured housing section at HUD overseeing everything and almost no coordination between the various stages of delivering a home to a consumer.

There is no such thing as a facilitator or systems analyst to diagnose the entire process. In fact there are extemely few people who are fluent in all the steps and could act in this capacity. Not only that, who would they work for? Is the dealer going to pay someone to help the factory correct the problems they unknowingly create? Are the installers going to make regular reports and/or visits to the factory to improve the overall functioning of the system? I think not. Don't say you are already helping them because you complain loud and long about problems to everyone. Complaining is only a symptom of a problem, it is a long way from automatically providing a solution. To solve the problem you must first know it exists, ( the complaint ) then you must be familiar with the entire system ( manufacturing thru set-up ) to determine where and how to fix it. The trouble lies in the fact that no one knows it all as a complete system. We have experts in the industry for the various steps involved but in the last 28 years in this business I have never met anyone who knows all about design, production, marketing, sales, financing, installation, repair, communities, transporting, foundations, the HUD Code, and all the state regulations concerning this industry.

We tend to concentrate on the parts instead of the system. What we have now is not a coordinated effort as a team to provide a product to consumers, it is mostly a collection of parts and that has to change if we are going to go from 30% to 60% of market share.

Please consider the following example. I recently experienced this during an installation seminar and was lucky enough to have the chief engineer and the production manager from the factory there. The trucking company, dealer, and installation crew were present as well. It is very unlikely that this group will ever be in the same location at one time again so it offered a unique opportunity to discuss and solve a problem.

The problem was that when the set-up folks arrived at the home it already had many drywall cracks around the doors and interior walls. They did not feel that they should have to fix them if they were not responsible for them being there. The factory said that they would pay them to repair the cracks if it was a production problem, these were not that bad yet but they would probably get much worse after shipping. The trucking company said it was impossible for anyone to move a tape and texture home without cracking because the frame flexes. The factory said the trucker was probably going too fast and that made the frame flex too much and the trucker said that if the home had a decent frame under it would not flex so badly and so on. The installer then jumps in with the fact that if all this happened before he got there, then how come he has to do all the fixing? This finger pointing is probably why all these people avoid getting together in the first place.

What we did was call for order and self-restraint ( not easy ) and proceeded to solve the problem. Why did the drywall crack? Was the frame weak? The chief engineer said absolutely not! The home was carefully designed and besides, their homes don't all crack this badly and they all have the same basic frame. Fine, except for one thing, this home had not left the factory yet! It had never left the yard! The seminar was being held at the factory and it already had cracks so that leaves the trucker and set-up guys out of it. This home was a very heavy load with cedar lap siding and a 7/12 roof pitch. Still the engineer said that the frame was not the problem so if he was right there must be another cause. The home had wood lap siding but of course it was not installed on the ends of the home. The siding was shipped loose just like most other multi- section homes and was laying on the living room floor. The chief engineer stated again that this was all figured into the plans and the frame was designed to take the load. The floor load of all HUD homes is 40 lbs/sq/ft and his home, with several tons of wood siding laying in the living room, probably exceeded this load. His reply was that it was a temporary load and was less than the combined roof and floor loads, besides it was loaded over the axles so it did not flex the frame that much. When we went around to the side of the home and looked at it, the living room was 10 feet in front of the axles! The engineer then said that the production manager was supposed to load the siding over the axle area so we called the production manager out to look at the home. It was pretty obvious why he could not follow the original loading plan. The living room was the only room long enough to hold the siding and besides if he could put the siding over the axles it would be in the kitchen and would destroy the vinyl floor.

Now we were getting close to a solution. The problem was that the production manager could not do what the engineer wanted and he really didn't have much choice about where he put the tons of siding. After three minutes of putting their heads together the engineer and the production manager figured out a possible solution. They had to leave the siding where it was but they could move the ten packs of shingles and all the other smaller packages to the other half of the home in it's axle area. This would lighten the load on the one half by at least 1500 lbs and maybe solve the problem of the cracks forming.

This is how things get done and problems get solved but only when all these folks work together and cooperate. The factory never knew it even had a problem, the dealer thought it was the trucker and the installer certainly knew it was not his fault but he had nobody to talk to about it. The set-up guy figured it was easier to just patch it than try to raise a big fuss.

What we need are more meetings like this so we can better understand the entire system. It is a team effort just like sports and we currently don't have much in the way of coaches to coordinate the team effort. If the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing it is pretty hard to applaud a job well done.