Accelerating technological developments and increasing competition make it important to secure the development of production solutions that allows for resource efficient layouts and continuous improvements. When developing production solutions, the usage of digital tools is an important asset that supports production preparation engineers in their work. However, the emerging possibilities to design production layouts where the operator and a robot collaboratively share a task, add more challenges for production preparation engineers. The production layout become more complex, with more parameters to analyze for a safe and secure working environment, supporting a safe interaction between technologies and operators. The design of human-robot-collaborative (HRC) layouts, with ever shorter product life cycles, could benefit from an increased use of digital tools, as ever more powerful simulation and design tools are available on the market. This paper will explore digital tools (such as simulation, emulation, visualization) and their potential contribution for different HRC layout designing steps. Based on this, the needs to be reflected in a guideline for a digitalized production preparation process will be explored from the perspective of developing a human-robot collaborative layout.. © 2022 The authors