Automobile manufactures are facing shrinking product lifecycles and increasingly complex production and product technologies. Both of these phenomena pressure production facilities to begin full scale operations at a point when the underlying process technology is still poorly understood. Consequently companies suffer from substantial yield losses which can dramatically affect the economics of the product, the production facility, and business. The manufacturing start-up will be defined as the time span equal to the difference between ‘time- to- market’ and’ time- to- volume’. A major goal of automobile manufacturers is to reduce the ‘time–to-market’, however they cannot evaluate the effects on the ‘time- to- volume’. This paper will give insight into these interdependencies and compare two policies for the management of changes during manufacturing start-up.