High innovative ability, increasing productivity and ever stronger customer orientation are the decisive success factors of manufacturing companies worldwide. The market pressure resulting from globalization forces the entire industry to invest future oriented and successfully into automation in order to stay competitive. In particular, customer orientation gradually leads to an increase in product variants and thus to an increase of complexity in production, especially in the areas of production control and automation. These fields of action offer significant opportunities for improving production key figures, but the combination of these is largely untreated in the literature. This constitutes considerable problems for many companies to implement meaningful models for increasing the degree of automation and mastering the variety of variants in production control. The aim of this thesis is the creation of variant-oriented influencing models in the areas of production automation and production control as well as their evaluation based on performance indicators of a production system using the example of an industrial finishing line. In combination the developed influence models provides a well-founded basis for significantly increasing the degree of automation of varied single and small batch production and shows what contribution product structuring and modularization can make.