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Automation Assessments That Find Your Biggest Growth Levers

The DEVELOP Automation Assessment

Before you commit CapEx, issue an RFQ, or redesign a line, you need to know where the biggest growth levers are in your operation and what it takes to pull them.

The DEVELOP Automation Assessment is how manufacturers add an automation department without the hiring timeline. We learn your business, scope real opportunities, and build an automation roadmap grounded in how your operation actually runs. The same engineers who assess the opportunity are the ones who design and build the systems.

This is engineering-led scoping built around real production data, CapEx justification, and your growth objectives. Your assessment investment is credited toward your first build, up to a maximum of $25,000.

Schedule Assessment Planning Call
Download the Automation Assessment eBook

Customers and Partners we’ve worked with

The Problem You’re Facing

You know automation is the right move. The problem is capacity.

You don’t have the time to scope it. You don’t have the team to execute it. And the longer it sits on the whiteboard, the longer your operation runs without the growth it needs.

Leadership wants answers:

  • What’s the return, and what’s the CapEx schedule to get there?
  • What gets automated first, and what’s the timeline?
  • How much will this grow the business?
  • How much risk are we taking on?

Those questions stall everything when the people who would build the strategy are already buried in the day-to-day. Most teams try to work through this internally. Some bring in industrial automation consulting support. Often, the result is a list of possible projects and a rough timeline, without clarity on which decisions actually matter.

Without a rigorous automation assessment, assumptions get locked in early. Scope changes, CapEx gets harder to defend, and growth gets left on the table.

Signs You Need an Automation Assessment

Most teams don’t start with a clean brief. They start with a problem that won’t scale.
We believe in making informed decisions. If you recognize any of the following, then you need an Automation Assessment to provide clarity on your industrial automation opportunities.

Start Where You Are. Build What Comes Next.

Every automation effort starts in a different place. The mistake is jumping into execution before the problem is clearly defined, or staying stuck in analysis when the business needs to move.

We’ve structured our Automation Assessment into three paths so you can start at the right level and move forward with confidence.

For teams that aren’t sure where to start. We walk your facility, sometimes multiple plants, and evaluate every potential automation opportunity from a 50,000-foot view. We’re looking for the biggest levers: converging lines, labor gaps, throughput constraints, quality bottlenecks. We filter them down, rank them, and prioritize.

Best for:

  • Not sure what to automate or where to start
  • Multiple automation opportunities with no clear priority
  • Leadership needs a plan before committing capital

Outcome: A prioritized list of automation opportunities with executive-level cost and ROI assumptions.
Typical timeline: approximately one month.

The Roadmap identifies the opportunities. Assessment & Scoping digs into the one or two projects with the highest ROI and scopes them to the point where you can build. We capture every project variable: SKUs, volumes, rates, upstream and downstream dependencies. The result is a CapEx-ready, build-ready proposal.

Up to $25,000 of the assessment is credited toward your first machine build.

Best for:

  • A defined opportunity that needs engineering-led scoping
  • Your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to put together a full scope
  • You need a CapEx-ready proposal leadership can approve

Outcome: A build-ready statement of work with documented assumptions, risk analysis, and cost modeling.
Typical timeline: approximately three months.

You have a new facility build, a major expansion, or a backlog of automation projects and no department to execute them. Your director of engineering is tasked with delivering but the team is either understaffed or doesn’t exist yet.

DEVELOP bolts on as your automation department. We execute machine builds, manage projects, and deploy systems at speed.

Best for:

  • Teams at or beyond internal capacity
  • Green builds or major expansions needing a full automation department
  • Multiple machine builds that need to move in parallel

Outcome: Sustained execution with speed and continuity, because we already know your operation.

Most teams don’t have a clean starting point.

We begin with a short virtual conversation to understand your operation, your constraints, and your goals. From there, we’ll point you to the right path.

If it’s not a fit, we’ll tell you.

Schedule a Free Planning Call

DEVELOP Is Your Automation Growth Partner

When you engage DEVELOP for an Assessment, you’re not hiring a consultant, but test-driving an automation department.

The same engineers who scope your opportunities are the ones who design and build the systems. The Assessment is how we learn your business. Everything after that gets faster, more precise, and more valuable because we already know your operation, your team, and your constraints.

We work with manufacturers across the United States from our facility in Verona, Wisconsin. Our clients operate across food and beverage, packaging, electronics, extrusion, life sciences, logistics, and plastics manufacturing. We ground every recommendation in rates, constraints, staffing realities, and how work actually flows today.

The longer we work together, the more value we create per dollar invested. That’s why most Assessment engagements become long-term partnerships.

Schedule Assessment Planning Call

How DEVELOP Approaches Automation Assessments

We start with one question: why do you want to automate?

We need to understand why you’re turning to automation, where your business is headed, and what you want your operation to look like over the next several years. CapEx for automation isn’t something that happens in one calendar year. It’s a multi-year investment, and being very specific about where you’re headed is critical to scoping it correctly.

From there, we build around the decisions leadership needs to make before approving capital. Scope, sequencing, and cost range are defined early so the conversation is grounded in reality, not assumptions.

The same team that evaluates the opportunity designs and builds the system. That continuity keeps every decision tied to real cycle times, real constraints, and real production conditions.

This video explains how those engagement paths work.

What You’ll Walk Away With

What you receive depends on the level of engagement.

From a Roadmap:

A prioritized list of automation opportunities ranked by impact Executive summary with cost assumptions and ROI direction Clear recommendation on where to focus first A document leadership can use to align internally before committing capital

From Assessment & Scoping:

Everything in the Roadmap, plus: Detailed process analysis (SKUs, volumes, rates, line dependencies) Constraint mapping across upstream and downstream System direction with integration considerations Accurate cost modeling with documented assumptions Risk analysis tied to implementation and production A CapEx-ready, build-ready proposal that leadership can approve and we can start executing from

From Extension of Team:

Everything in Assessment & Scoping, but at a larger scale and on an ongoing basis Embedded engineering and project execution across your operation System design, build, integration, and delivery Multiple machine builds scoped and deployed in parallel

Schedule Assessment Planning Call

Real-World Impact

Case Study: Elec-Tron (KS)

From manual labor and capacity-constrained growth to automated, high-volume production.

Challenge: Scaling production without burning out staff and equipment

Solution: DEVELOP delivered an Automation Roadmap, scoped a custom system, and built the solution

Outcome: Outcome: 4+ million units per year, high-mix capability, and a system that scaled with the business

See the Full Case Study
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Cycle Reduction

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Return on Investment

Free Tools and Resources

Not every team is starting from the same place. These tools and services meet you where you are, whether you’re just exploring business automation solutions or actively planning your next automated manufacturing system.

Find Out if Automation’s a Fit

This quick, 2-minute survey is designed to uncover whether automation is a good fit for your operation. It’s the first step in our Automation Assessment process and helps you pinpoint high-value opportunities without a big time or budget commitment.

Get quick answers

Plan Smarter with Our Free Guide

Our free eBook, Automate to Elevate, gives you a framework for smarter, faster decision-making. It includes templates, ROI tools, and insights we use in our own automation strategy services, so you can start shaping your plan from the inside out.

Explore the Free Guide

Talk to an Automation Expert

Talk directly with our team of engineers about your systems, bottlenecks, or goals. We’ll walk through your options and recommend next steps, whether that’s on-site discovery, virtual support, or ongoing automation consulting services.

Book a Free Consultation

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Manufacturers usually arrive here with similar questions. These answers focus on when an Automation Assessment actually matters, what it prevents, and how it changes the outcome of industrial automation projects once real constraints show up.

An automation assessment is a structured way to evaluate an industrial automation project before capital is committed.

It looks at how your factory actually runs today, where constraints live, and which automation projects are realistic given current rates, variability, labor touchpoints, and infrastructure. The goal is to replace assumptions with data so automation decisions hold up once execution starts.

At DEVELOP, Automation Assessments focus on readiness, sequencing, and risk, not just identifying ideas.

An Automation Assessment makes sense when automation feels necessary, but the path forward isn’t clear enough to approve.

It also applies when the direction is understood, but internal teams don’t have the time, bandwidth, or specialised experience to scope and execute it correctly.

This often happens around packaging and palletizing systems, automated assembly lines, or legacy systems that have grown fragile over time. Teams know something needs to change, but they don’t yet have a shared view of scope, ROI, or order of operations.

The assessment defines that direction clearly and, when needed, becomes the first step toward extending your team with DEVELOP to carry the work forward.

Most automation risk shows up after early decisions are already locked in. An Automation Assessment reduces that risk by pressure-testing assumptions early. It identifies which processes are stable enough to automate, where bottlenecks in manufacturing are likely to shift, and which dependencies will shape cost and delivery timelines.

That clarity prevents rework, stalled approvals, and automation projects that technically function but fail to perform in production.

Automation project management focuses on executing a defined scope. An Automation Assessment exists before that. It defines what the scope should be, how the automation project lifecycle should be sequenced, and which decisions carry the most risk if made too early.

For many manufacturers, this is the missing step that keeps automation project management from becoming reactive once the project is underway.

An automation roadmap translates assessment findings into a plan that leadership can act on. It typically includes automation readiness across people, process, and infrastructure, identification of bottlenecks in manufacturing, evaluation of manual processes, and ROI logic tied to real production constraints.

The roadmap also defines a phased automation delivery model so improvements don’t introduce new instability elsewhere in the factory.

For most teams, the roadmap becomes the reference point for future automation projects.

Yes, but not by chasing labor savings in isolation. Manufacturing cost is often driven by overtime, quality variation, schedule padding, and engineering time spent managing workarounds. On pick and place systems or automated assembly lines, those costs tend to hide until volume increases.

An Automation Assessment helps reduce manufacturing cost by addressing where inefficiency gets locked into the system, not just where labor can be removed.

Automation readiness matters more than company size, but this work is best suited to manufacturers running complex operations or planning for meaningful growth.

Many companies in the $100M–$1B+ range reach this point when production demands outpace internal engineering capacity or when automation decisions carry real capital risk.

The assessment adapts to your current operation and scales with the complexity of the opportunity, not the size of the organization.

Once the assessment defines a clear direction, the next step is execution. In most cases, that means either moving forward with a defined machine build or establishing an extension-of-team model where DEVELOP operates as your automation function.

The same engineering context carries forward into that work. Scope, constraints, and production realities are not reinterpreted or restarted. They become the foundation for execution.

That continuity allows you to leverage DEVELOP’s team, systems, and automation SOPs without rebuilding the work from scratch.

It means DEVELOP operates as your automation department. You get the engineering capacity you want, mechanical, electrical, controls, and software, embedded in your operation without the hiring timeline. Most Extension of Team engagements start with an Assessment because we need to understand your business before we can support it correctly. The longer we work together, the more value we create, because every project starts from a higher baseline of understanding.