Manufacturing Automation Checklist
Thirteen jobs that quietly eat a manufacturing week, from inventory reconciliation to paper QC logs, and what automating each one looks like. Tick what your team still does by hand and price it up.
What manual work is costing your plant
Tick the jobs your team still does by hand, set the loaded hourly cost of the people doing them, and the panel on the right totals the hours and the annual price tag. Every figure is your inputs, nothing is sent or stored.
What it's costing you
Hours are typical weekly time per task; costs use one representative manufacturing hourly rate. Adjust it to yours.
Highest payback first
Fix: connect your inventory system to your ERP so counts sync in real time and discrepancies trigger automatic alerts
Fix: auto-route incoming orders from a web form straight into your ERP and production schedule, no re-keying
Fix: read invoice PDFs with AI extraction, match them to POs, and route for approval automatically
Fix: pull production data from your MES and auto-generate shift summary emails at each changeover
Fix: replace paper QC logs with a mobile form feeding a central dashboard in real time
Fix: auto-tag, categorise, and file compliance documents to the right place, with expiry alerts
Fix: route POs by value threshold to the right approver and notify them automatically
Fix: generate first-draft quotes and proposals from your product, pricing, and spec data, ready to review and send
Steady gains next
Fix: trigger automatic email or SMS updates as each order milestone is hit
Fix: automate timesheet reminders and roll submissions into payroll-ready data
Fix: turn maintenance emails into tracked tickets and notify the assigned technician
Fix: log incidents through a simple form and auto-generate timestamped reports for management
Fix: auto-generate and print shipping labels the moment an order is confirmed
Fix: digitise safety checklists, log results, and flag failed items automatically
Fix: build templated, on-demand reports that pull live production, delivery, and quality data instead of being assembled manually
What you get back
LiveHours are typical weekly defaults; adjust the rate to your loaded cost. Each task is hours × rate × 52 weeks. Illustrative estimate.
Want the payback on fixing these? Run the ROI calculator
What this checklist does
On a busy shop floor the manual admin is easy to miss, because it is spread across shifts, departments, and spreadsheets. This checklist gathers the most common culprits in one place, from inventory reconciliation and production order entry to supplier invoices, shift handovers, and QC logging, and puts an annual cost against each. Tick the ones that match how your plant runs today and watch the total build.
How the maths works
Each task carries a typical number of hours it eats every week. The cost of a single task is hours × your hourly rate × 52 weeks; the headline figures are the totals across every task you leave ticked. Change the rate or switch currency and every per-task cost and total recomputes instantly.
The hours are sensible defaults drawn from manufacturers we work with, not a promise about your plant, so treat the result as an illustrative estimate and adjust the rate to your loaded cost. The point is the order of magnitude and which jobs are worth fixing first, not a figure to the penny.
Who it is for
It is for plant managers, operations directors, and owners of manufacturing businesses who know the admin is heavy but have never totalled it. The tasks are ordered highest payback first, so you can see where automating would free the most time before you commit to anything.
Where to go next
Size it from another angle, or talk to us about fixing the jobs you have ticked:
- Savings Calculator, to total the busywork across your whole team
- ROI Calculator, to weigh the cost of the fix against the saving
- AI Business Automation, automating the repetitive work itself
- Custom Software, replacing the manual process with a tailored system
- Excel to Software, turning the spreadsheets behind the work into a proper system