Increasing factory-completeness of manufactured units
#1Manufactured housing factories (Clayton Homes, Cavco, Skyline Champion) are progressively moving more work inside the factory environment, where automation is far cheaper and more feasible than on-site. Recent factory investments include pre-plumbing entire water distribution manifolds before shipment, pre-wiring circuit panels with labeled home-run cables, and shipping units with HVAC ducts pre-installed and only requiring final trunk-line connection. Clayton Homes' iClayton smart home integration ships with pre-wired Alexa infrastructure — previously an on-site add-on. The theoretical endpoint is a 'plug-and-play' unit requiring only utility stub connection rather than system construction.