The challenge of planning and controlling the production of one-off manufacturing companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), is high and requires a high level of experience to be able to plan the individual work steps accurately. If the planning is wrong or a machine breaks down, a delayed reaction can lead to delivery problems in time and thus cause additional costs. For this reason, a systematic literature review examines how individual manufacturers and producing SMEs can track work steps and what technologies exist to implement intelligent progress tracking in a company with variable and partly volatile work content and quantities. For this purpose, general problems are summarized and new machine vision technologies from the assembly and construction industries are compiled so that a broad overview can be created here. Finally, based on the literature, implementation opportunities are presented, and further research gaps are identified.

Despite promising developments towards a circular economy, a recent study by EUROSTAT concluded that only 12% of EU’s economy is circular. One cause is suspected in particular in the fact that the scientific knowledge relating to the design and development of sustainable and recyclable products and processes has not arrived sufficiently in industrial practice. Educational offers for practitioners in circular design and engineering are still sparse and taken up hesitantly by companies in this context either. To close this educational gap, we have developed a particular training program for learning of Circular Design and Engineering principles. The development of the program was publicly funded and involved five industry partners from furniture and interiors industry. In this paper, we describe the underlying educational concept and lessons learned from a particular application of the concept in the Austrian furniture and interiors industry.