Combining metal sheets and thermoplastics into hybrid structures is a promising approach to design geometrically complex and highly durable lightweight parts. To ensure an economical production of these hybrid structures, the metal component can be overmoulded with a thermoplastic compound in an injection moulding process. Due to the dissimilarity of the materials, a suitable pretreatment of the metal sheet is required to ensure proper adhesion of the components. Plasma technology can be used to apply an adhesion promoter based on a precursor onto the metal surface. Furthermore, plasma pretreating can be integrated into the automated process chain. Additionally the metal sheet has to be preheated to activate the adhesion promoter. Besides the preheating temperature of the metal insert, the process parameters of the precursor application and the injection moulding process influence the adhesion strength of the joint between the metal and the thermoplastic. To identify the process window for sufficient adhesion, parameter studies based on a design of experiments are carried out. The manufactured hybrid test specimens are tested according to DIN EN 1465 for mode 1 shear strength. Additionally, the failure mode is evaluated by optical analysis. As a result, a correlation between the process parameters of plasma pretreatment and the structural property shear strength is derived.