Manufacturing has seen progress during the industrial revolution from Industry 1.0 to 4.0. Recent manufacturing processes involve various systems and several challenges remain to handle. For example, the spread of the virus COVID-19 in the late of 2019 has talked many industrial abilities and various manufacturing systems shown incapacities. Therefore, any manufacturing system and the process should be improved and tested under crisis scenarios. The book “Manufacturing Systems: Progress and Future Directions” is a source of the latest research and technical notes in manufacturing systems. This book is useful for students, researchers, and all readers interested in this topic. It is organized into twenty-seven chapters. Chapter 3 annotation: Cognitive mapping is a soft computing technique that is suitable for the analysis and simulation of dynamic ill-structured systems and situations. The cognitive map is a formalized model of the heterogeneous knowledge representation of the causal influences of significant factors of such systems and situations. This chapter presents the technology of the strategic goal-setting and monitoring of a manufacturing system development on the basis of cognitive mapping. The technology includes an open set of approaches and techniques aimed at the early stages of solving system development problems in ill-structured situations: diagnosing problems and dynamic goal-setting in the framework of strategic management. Some capabilities of the technology itself and its integration with time series analysis are demonstrated by applied examples.