Higher customer's expectations and new technological developments have resulted in an increased complexity of manufacturing systems. Consequently, work planning and production control have become more crucial than ever to the success of companies. Adaptive work planning and production control approaches offer high potential with respect to flexibility and complexity management. However, the approaches find little use in practice, since the automatic acquisition of all potentially relevant information with additional sensors is cost-intensive and not feasible in many cases. At the same time, the potential of already existing production data, that is stored in Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), remains untapped. This paper presents a method for automated production data feedback that guarantees a systematic update of production plan data only based on MES data. The functionality of the method is validated exemplarily at a thread manufacturer. The results reveal that an MES can provide a sufficient database for adaptive work planning and production control approaches. Moreover, the developed method can be applied to identify suitable workstations and measurement categories for additional sensor implementation.