Planning for production is based on a comparison between the target and actual status. Performance figures are used to prioritize and evaluate these. In small companies with limited resources, cost-intensive developments such as setting up production can seriously jeopardize the success of a company. The lack of key figures makes it difficult to prioritize measures. For this reason, a systematic trendbased foresight approach is presented and evaluated in this paper. With the help of systematic

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... oresight for product development, it is possible to prioritize development scopes, identify innovation potential in features and identify transformation stages for an existing production system. In order to evaluate the result, the persons involved in the systematics are interviewed. Three people with varying levels of participation were involved in the implementation, two of whom already have previous knowledge of product development. The created acceptance and trust show that this approach can support in taking future decisions. The identification of product characteristics on the basis of trends leads to a reduction of the uncertainty of future developments and the associated risk, also because developments are classified in several stages. The realization of irrelevant product features is avoided and future relevant features are uncovered. The structured approach of the systematic approach ensures a high level of safety during implementation and can be easily transferred to a production system. It is important to consider that the production system is understood as a product.