Unit technology is Sekisui Chemical's unique construction method for providing high-quality houses. Using factory-based production technology, we can solve three problems and design houses with high quality and high performance.    What are the three problems? 1. Weather influences houses under construction, making quality unstable. 2. The quality of completed structures varies greatly, depending upon the builders' skills. 3. It is difficult to ensure that the quality of a house will be as designed when the builders are allowed to provide the construction material. That these problems were inevitable in the Japanese housing industry was traditionally taken for granted. How has unit technology resolved these problems? 1. The weather problem: We can complete over 80% of the construction process at the factory. The length of on-site construction period is around 40 days, shorter than other prefabricated housing construction methods in Japan. We can protect our customers' houses from bad weather during the construction period since only one day is required to complete the installation of units and roofing at the site. Factory-production also enables us to eliminate the bad effects of dust and to ensure that the quality of the painting, welding strength, and adhesive strength are as designed. It is possible, of course, for traditional construction methods to pursue this kind of performance by using excess adhesives and the like, but the result is unreasonable cost and increases in the customer's burden. 2. The problem of builders' skills: We can cope with this problem by taking the following countermeasures:    1) Allotting work.    2) Ensuring optimum work attitude.    3) The introduction of the large-scale equipment and utilizing robots. 1) Allotting the work makes workmen improve their skills and acquire expertise, ensuring houses of higher quality than those built by traditional craftsmen. 2) With other construction methods, it is difficult, for posture reasons, for even skilled craftsmen to work on ceilings or in attics. But our workers have the advantage of being able to use optimum large-scale equipment and facility layouts. We can sometimes even reverse the top and bottom of units to ease ceiling work postures. 3) Large-scale equipment and the utilization of robots are features of factory-based production. We use robots for important structural aspects such as building floor joists and welding steel frames. Automation with robots leads to over-all quality improvement and reduction of labor. 3. The way to provide high-quality materials: Our factories make purchases in lots to provide high-quality materials. Materials used at the construction sites, too, are ordered in lots and thoroughly inspected at the time of delivery to ensure that they meet our rigorous standards. In this way, we can provide our customers high-quality materials.

Factory Painting of a Two-U Home Installation of kitchen equipment Heim assembly line Two-U Home assembly line HAPPS: Heim Automated Part Pick-up System