Manufacturing SMEs are structurally di erent from other companies and therefore have special requirments for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and the associated software selection. Process models must therefore be adapted. For the identication of requirements, a systematic categorization based on existing models was performed. With the help of an existing market research platform, further selection steps were developed in order to provide a useful and easy-to-use tool for SMEs, which enables them to select efficiently sufficient MES-software according to their needs.