In the face of digitization in manufacturing industries, the judicious evaluation and selection of cutting-edge CNC machines play a pivotal role in achieving production-grade precision, accuracy and manufacturing agility. The evaluation of 3-axes CNC machines incorporates most sought-after subjective and objective criteria having significant relative weights and green impacts. This research paper presents a novel heterogeneous expert based decision making (HGEDM) framework incorporating a diversified combination of experts having distinct impact factors. The experts’ impact factors so calculated impart significant contributions in computing weighted aggregated performance ratings of the alternatives. To establish the effectiveness of the suggested approach, three practical selection problems are illustrated. The calculated findings are validated with few well-established approaches demonstrating the realistic nature of the suggested methodology. To assess the stability and robustness of the proposed approach, a sensitivity analysis is performed. Besides, Spearman’s rank correlation measure demonstrates that the ranks obtained using the proposed approach are highly close to those derived from several existing methods. Furthermore, both Pearson correlation coefficient and Sample correlation coefficient measures show a strong association between the proposed approach and existing ones. Therefore, the proposed HGEDM approach is considered to be a consistent and effective tool for supporting optimal selection.