Although high efforts were made to get a deeper understanding of grinding processes for many years, it is still not possible to clearly predict the alteration of the workpiece surface layer caused by grinding. To achieve this objective, the material loads occurring during grinding and the material modifications remaining in the material have to be considered. This knowledge enables the concept of Process Signatures describing correlations between internal material loads and induced modifications. For the prediction of residual stresses occurring in a single step grindin process, various theoretical approaches can be derived. In most of these approaches, grinding processes are investigated considering the same initial state of the workpieces in terms of material, heat treatment but also in terms of functional properties such as the residual stress state generated by the previous manufacturing processes. The influence of different initial states on the residual stress state after grinding is still not clear but of high interest, taking into account that grinding is usually performed as a process consisting of multiple steps (multistage grinding). In this context, this paper focusses on the effect of different initial states that are generated in the first grinding step on the grinding process in the subsequent grinding step e.g. regarding the residual stress state. Correlations are identified between internal material loads and the residual stress in multistage grinding. To gain a deeper knowledge of the interaction between thermally and mechanically induced internal loads, the combined laser and deep rolling process is introduced. In contrast to grinding, this process allows the variation of the thermal and mechanical load independently from each other, so that acting mechanisms regarding materials loads and resulting material modifications can be revealed which serve to optimize the multistage grinding processes in the future.