Automotive industry faces challenges in manufacturing like increasingly individualized products with a short lead-time to market and higher quality. Additionally to that, new technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data, data analytics and cloud computing, are changing the production into the next generation of industry. To address these challenges intelligent manufacturing in combination with data analytics plays an important role. In this sense, the integration of prescriptive analytics in manufacturing may help industry to increase productiveness. This paper provides first a comprehensive review of key elements for prescriptive analytics in manufacturing. Furthermore, this paper highlights requirements for a prescriptive analytics based production control, so called prescriptive automation, and finally points out field of activities in this topic.