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HE physical substance of a house is a pile of materials assembled from widely scattered sources. They undergo different kinds and degrees of processing in large numbers of places, require many types of handling over periods that vary greatly in length, and use the services of a multitude of people organized into many different sorts of business entity. The marketing of housebuilding materials may therefore be viewed as a vast exercise in logistics. For any given house, the parts of the process must be well enough performed and coordinated so that in the end all the separate pieces come together. These pieces must arrive at reasonably acceptable times, in a tolerable sequence, and at bearable prices upon the particular small piece of ground where a builder and his contractors combine them into a house some consumer
Cox et al. (1956) studied this question.