Introducing computerized systems to automate engineering design activities (design automation) on manufacturing companies promises improved product quality, shortened time to production, increased control on cost, less effort to adapt products to new customer requirements. Due to these motives, big effort has been put on developing computer systems automating a variety of engineering design activities throughout the product and production development process. The question is now: Is design automation ready to launch yet? In this paper, we review four cases of design automation of engineer-to-order to give guidelines for developing engineering design automation systems.