Manufacturing industries are facing major challenges. Highly volatile markets in combination with an increasing need for individualization and speed, disruptive Innovations and constantly changing customer requirements are just some of the problems that need to be solved in order to stay competitive. As a result of different approaches to deal with market needs, the manufacturing reality is characterized by a constantly increasing complexity of production systems.

The achievement of manufacturing goals combined with the needed performance is highly depending on the production planning and control (PPC) and its configuration.
Information technologies were utilized to handle these problems, but still one major challenge is to find an appropriate production and manufacturing strategy.

The fact that most of the production related configurations are based on customer requirements and specific business needs shows that best practices in general do not exist. In order to gain a production-related flexibility and a higher product quality, companies all around the world started to adopt different manufacturing technologies and strategies to fit their specific needs. Despite renowned research initiatives in the field of production management, the selection and combination of appropriate PMCS (Production and Manufacturing Control Strategies) is still widely unaddressed research field.

After a short introduction the author is going to specify the examined area as well as the applicability of different PMCS based on their primary emphasis.
Then an approach will be presented in which production systems are going to be split into smaller elements (segments), that are going to be examined concerning the following properties:

•Object-related production properties
•Structure-related production properties
•Complexity-related production properties
•Automation-related production properties

The evaluation of these different properties helps to select appropriate strategies for each segment and therefore for the whole production line.

The paper concludes with a perspective on further fields of research within this work.