Behaviour patterns in expert recognition by means of structured expert judgement in price estimation in customized furniture manufacturing

Abstract

The furniture manufacturing sector of the Baltics is facing serious challenges common in all European countries, namely, the growing global competition for customized solutions. New standards to be followed in the industry tend to increase production costs, extend manufacturing time and cause frequent errors in the product quality. To maintain sustainability, companies need decision support instruments, allowing an immediate reaction to customized orders and proper evaluation of manufacturing procedures, costs and deadlines. The complex problem of cost estimation at an early stage could be solved partly by strengthening operational research in decision support systems supplemented with machine learning techniques. Additional reliability could be acquired complementing an intelligent system with a human knowledge intervention and applying outcomes of behavioural operational research. Scientific and methodological issues of how to integrate the output of structured expert judgement into an intelligent cost estimation system is a pressing problem. The goal of the pre-sent research is to look into the cultural pattern of competence recognition within furniture industry with the purpose to adjust the structural expert judgement strategy as an instrument to validate expert input into the decision support tool for cost estimation. The research is based on mix method strategy (a qualitative study, a quantitative study and an structural expert judgement experiment). The findings clearly highlighted that a well-composed group of experts could be a possible solution in assessing uncertain aspects of cost estimation. Although the cultural model of the furniture sector would recommend a slightly different approach: the top executives and the best engineers in this sector are seen as experts. This should be taken into account when developing methodological recommendations for the implementation of the structural expert judgement.