A new machine that would allow you to link several machines of the same type (maybe eventually different types), which in turn spreads the operations evenly among those machines.
So rather than trying to work out how many jobs on each machine is the most efficient for the amount of crafting materials I have, the machine controller just adds the operation to the machine with the lowest amount of current operations (could be based on time instead, not sure if that would be more difficult to program).
I’m sure it could be expanded to other uses as well (feed spanners for auto repair, maybe eventually creating production lines) but I think would be a good start towards some form of automation.
A nod to Little Big Workshop for the idea.