The fourth Industrial Revolution sets higher standards for the manufacturing itself and all associated processes. A promising direction in this context is the concept of Zero-Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) aiming at further automatization and optimisation of the production processes to reduce resources and avoid useless elements in the production chains. Moreover, the modern industrial systems are highly complex and require collaboration with other systems for the products’ manufacturing and maintenance. This fact leads to the necessity for the better approaches for design, development, evaluation and assessment of manufacturing systems. The goal of this article is to assess some key European research projects on industrial manufacturing to re-use their achievements for design of the ZDM systems. Another goal is to identify the basis for an umbrella platform able to integrate the functionalities of other manufacturing platforms. Thus, interoperability and collaboration issues are also in the scope of this work.