With the increasing cost pressure on producing companies to bring their products and processes to a highly productive level, development, production and process engineers are forced to do that in more efficient ways. Therefore, methods are necessary, which are able to analyze technical systems with the minimal use of resources. The aim of pinpointing the differences between random and systematic influences on the criteria of interest is followed by a set of methods called design of experiments (DoE). The main goal of this master thesis is giving an overview of the single methods of design of experiments with respect to their possibilities of use. Further, the systematic picking of a subset of DoE-methods for the use in a real industrial project is described as well as the specific method combination with the help of an adapted experiment strategy. The theoretical framework of this thesis divides the different methods into groups, with the background of their main objectives, and moreover describes and evaluates them. Built on that framework, the thesis describes the system to be optimized in the practical part. To be more precise, the activation of plastic exterior automotive parts of the BMW Group by flaming as a pretreatment for the painting process. Together with the circumstances of the experiments, a method for the use within the optimization project is chosen as well as an adapted experiment strategy derived. Just like the thesis shows, it is often a matter of fact, that the experiment strategy makes the difference between success and failure. The experiment circumstances can thereby be named as a main influence on the strategy development. With the help of the gained knowledge from the experiments, the thesis ends with recommendations for follow-up projects as well as for the know-how transfer into the real process. With the help of the gathered data, the thesis shows that many complex industrial processes are not fully understood, which often complicates optimization. An evidence for that is especially the standard setting of a process, which is also in the case of the documented project far below its performance possibilities. To sum up, the overbalance of the advantages of methodical system analysis can be underlined, as shown also within complex industrial projects like the activation of plastic exterior parts by flaming.