Todays manufacturing industry is challenged by highly volatile markets combined with an increasing need for individualization and speed.
As a result, of competitive strategies the manufacturing reality is characterized by a constantly increasing complexity of production systems. Over the last decades, information technologies were utilized to handle these problems, but still one major challenge is the usage of the ”right” production and manufacturing strategy. Various approaches exist, each has its different properties for different environments. So companies are faced with an important long-term decision, which is usually made without considering essential criteria.
The changing purchasing pattern of customers resulting from the ubiquity of Internet combined with a high variety of more or less customer-specific products, leads to shorter product life cycles, diversified and changing customer demands and a higher consciousness concerning product quality and rapid advancement of manufacturing technology.

To gain 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 this area of production management, the challenge of selecting an appropriate PMCS has not been solved.

-The term PMCS (Production and Manfacturing Control strategy) was chosen, because it is referred to the combination of information flow and the logic behind the method that controls the material flow)-

[11] Within this paper, the author outlines the importance of evaluating essential criteria, by showing up a first approach on how to gather the needed information for selecting an appropriate strategy.