ERP on the edge of knowledge retention: how to prevent knowledge loss in customized manufacturing
Customized manufacturing entails a personalization demand, which turns manufacturing into a complex task difficult to solve automatically. Customized manufacturing requires completely new technological solutions and long and careful prototype development and testing. The technology-based approach relies on collection and preservation of information and factual data and ERP is the most common solution to realize that approach (Blankenship & Brueck, 2008). However, it still fails to respond to the customized needs even though ERPs provide plenty of innovative solutions for prognosis, trending, etc. The study shows, that production of customized furniture takes on average 60 percent longer than production of standardized furniture. The study also reveals that the costs of custom-made furniture production (cost estimation) are usually predictable, taking into account furniture size (11.6%), production time (25.2%), design coincidences (8.8%), used materials (26.1%) marketing (9.0%) and know-how (19.3%). The goal of this paper is to investigate the ways of knowledge preservation recognizing the ERP role and defining the stimulus to preserve knowledge for future decisions in cost estimation in customized production.