FACTORY OF THE FUTURE CONSULTING
Industrial Automation Consulting for Manufacturers
Automation strategy and tactical roadmaps to transform your manufacturing operations, from a consulting team that also designs, builds and commissions automation systems.
50 Years
of factory automation consulting
2-3 Days
on site for a
typical workshop
A3 Member
Association for Advancing Automation
Fee Credits
against
implementation
Your Partner for What’s Possible
Industrial automation consulting is the work of deciding what to automate, in what order and with what return, before any equipment is specified. Invio Automation’s Factory of the Future (FotF) practice does that work as part of a turnkey systems integrator.
We work with manufacturing companies to define an automation strategy, prioritize the opportunities on the factory floor and engineer the concepts, then put a business case behind each one. When you decide to build, the same people carry the work into detailed design, build and commissioning.
Most manufacturing automation consulting services end with a report and a suggestion that you find an integrator. Our factory automation consulting starts from 50 years of designing and building the equipment, so every idea we investigate gets checked against what can be built, what it would cost and how long it would take. You leave with projects you can take to your board, each with a layout, a concept and a number attached.
Consulting That Leads Into Building
Every automation project moves through the same eight stages. Strategy firms and generalist consulting firms cover the front end and hand you on. Invio’s consulting scope covers Discovery, Project Scoping, RFQ and Proposals, and Design Concepts as a standalone engagement. Detailed Design, Build, Commission and Sustain follow when you choose to proceed, delivered by Invio and not routinely subcontracted.
| Strategy firms and generalist advisers | Invio Factory of the Future | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the analysis | Management consultants | Automation engineers who design and build production systems |
| What you receive | A report and a recommendation | An engineering study that ends in an actionable roadmap, with project-specific deliverables such as 3D concepts, layouts, simulation and budgetary estimates |
| Where the numbers come from | Desk research and industry benchmarks | Budgetary estimates from the company that would have to build to them |
| Vendor position | Varies by firm | Vendor-neutral, brand-agnostic and industry-agnostic. We specify what fits the application, whoever makes it |
| What happens next | You take the report to an integrator and start again | The same team moves into detailed design, build, FAT, SAT, commissioning, training and aftermarket support |
| What the fee buys | A sunk cost | Credits against implementation if you build with Invio |
Pulling engineering forward into the consulting phase means the layouts, concepts and budgetary estimates that reach your board have already been checked against build reality. The workshops put operations, engineering, quality and leadership in the same room before anything changes. They also tend to turn up things that are cheaper to design for now than to retrofit later, like sizing an AGV interface into a robotic cell from the start.
Manufacturing Automation Consulting Services: Four Kinds of Work
Assess and prioritize
Where should automation go first?
This starts with a workshop on your floor, usually two to three days, with operators, engineers and site leadership in the room. We walk the value stream end to end, log every opportunity we find, and score each one on value to the business against complexity to implement, so the list you leave with is already ranked.
Investor Due Diligence applies the same method to a plant you’re thinking of buying, for owners who want an engineer’s view of the automation upside before they close.
- Automation Feasibility Evaluation
- Automation Readiness Audit
- Opportunity Mapping
- Bottleneck Alleviation
- Throughput Study
- Material Handling Automation Assessments
- Investor Due Diligence
Engineer and Simulate
What would it look like, and would it work?
Back at Invio, our application engineers take the top opportunities from the workshop and turn them into 3D concepts, layout drawings and simulations. Visual Components animations show leadership the future state in a two-minute fly-through.
A static Excel model sizes every AGV application we look at. FlexSim discrete event simulation handles fleet-based systems with non-uniform work, where dispatch logic and queue behavior decide whether the numbers hold. When the risk sits in the process itself rather than the machine, we prototype the process first.
- Robotic Process Concepting and Simulation
- Discrete Event Simulation
- Tooling Concept Development
- Proof of Principle / Process Prototyping
- Design for Automation / Design for Manufacturing
Justify
What does it cost, and what does it return?
Every concept that survives the engineering phase gets line-item budgetary estimates, a direct labor model, and a CAPEX and ROI view your finance team can pull apart with the payback period for each. The estimates come from the same engineers who would later quote the system, which is why they tend to hold up when the proposal arrives.
- CAPEX Planning
- ROI Assessment
- Direct Labor Savings
Plan the Facility and the Digital Factory
How should the whole plant work?
For greenfield builds, new product introductions and volume ramps, we design the production system rather than a single cell: layout and flow, material handling, work balance at the target volume, and the digital layer that will run it. Digital factory pilots start small, one machine fleet and one dashboard, and prove the data is worth having before anyone signs for a platform. When your team needs bandwidth more than it needs a study, our manufacturing engineers embed with yours on contract.
- Greenfield Facility Process Design
- Layout & Flow Optimization
- Digital Factory Pilot Projects
- Manufacturing Engineering Services (embedded contract support)
Contact Us To Discuss Your FotF Project
Share a few details about your operation and the challenge you’re looking to address. Our Factory of the Future team will review your message and follow up to discuss which engagement options fit.
- Scoping call before any proposal
- Firm quote, no packages
- Consulting fee credits against implementation
How it Works: Collaboratively Defining An Automation Strategy
An engagement has four stages. The first is a call. The second happens on your floor. The third and fourth happen at Invio, with a weekly check-in so nothing gets designed in a vacuum.
Stage 1 | Remote
Scoping Call
About an hour
Stage 2 | Your factory
On-site Workshop
2 to 3 days
Stage 3 | Invio
Engineering
4 to 6 weeks
Stage 4 | Together
Report-Out
One session
1. Scoping Call
We define the problem with you before anyone books a flight. What are the levers that would move your operation, which of the four kinds of work fit, and who needs to be in the room? Most engagements are scoped case by case from a short menu of options, then confirmed with a firm quote and a PO. Nobody is asked to buy a package.
2. On-site Workshop, Two To Three Days
A cross-functional team of Invio engineers and your stakeholders works the plant end to end. We speak with technicians, operators, engineers and site leadership, because each of them sees a different set of problems. Over the two or three days we assess existing tooling, review plans for any new facility, whiteboard the ideal future state, review product-specific CAD, document technical requirements and agree which areas deserve concept work. Larger sites run to four days.
3. Engineering At Invio, Four To Six Weeks
The application engineers take the priority areas from the workshop and develop the automation and tooling concepts. We meet with your team weekly through this phase and iterate as both sides learn more. This is where Visual Components animations, static AGV models and, where the operation warrants it, FlexSim discrete event simulation get built.
4. Deliverables And Report-Out
Every engagement ends with an engineering study, presented in a formal session with your engineering and leadership teams together. It covers the current state, the opportunities we investigated, the technical risks we expect and how to mitigate them, and a business case for each recommendation. Together they form a factory transformation roadmap. What sits behind the study depends on the engagement: a future-state layout drawing, 3D concepts, simulation, system specifications, budgetary estimates. We build what the project needs.
On one recent two-day visit the workshop logged 28 opportunities. Four went forward for deep study, and each came back with a concept, a CAPEX estimate, a lead time and an ROI.
The point of the process is to gather the people who will sign off on the investment early, so consensus forms around a plan with numbers in it rather than around a slide. Pulling engineering forward at this stage, typically 3 to 5 percent of a project’s total cost, is what removes most of the uncertainty from the scope and budget of the projects that follow.
How We Find And Rank Opportunities
We use four working tools in the workshop to identify and rank opportunities. Each gives everyone in the room a common lens.
The Big Board
Every idea on one wall
A whiteboard session where the workshop team agrees a segmentation of the plant, usually by process block, and brainstorms opportunities against each one. Sketching is encouraged. The aim is to get every idea in the building onto one wall.
The 2×2
Value against complexity
Each opportunity from the Big Board gets placed on a grid of value to the business against complexity to implement. Value covers labor savings, safety and ergonomics, bottleneck relief, quality, scaling without headcount, and hard-to-fill roles. Complexity covers industry precedent, SKU count, cycle time constraints, footprint, testing effort and how much of the process is new. It takes under two hours and it tells you where to spend the engineering weeks. Dependencies between projects get flagged here too, because one project going in often changes what the next one needs.
Hot-Spot Scoring
Weighted ranking across criteria
For portfolios that need more than a directional view, each opportunity is scored across weighted criteria and ranked by weighted average. Once ROI and cost estimates exist, they go into the same score.
Process Walk Worksheets
Yes/no questions on the floor walk
Before the floor walk, we prepare a list of yes/no questions that mark a process out as a likely automation candidate. Every participant fills one in as they walk, so the tour produces a comparable record rather than a set of impressions.
Process Improvement Before machinery
Our team works from a continuous improvement mindset. Rather than automating a single station in isolation, we look at material flows, lean manufacturing discipline and operational process design across the whole value stream, because a robot bolted onto a broken process just makes the same mistakes faster.
Some of the highest-return recommendations we make have no automation in them: a layout change, a re-balanced line, a different delivery policy for material to the floor. When a process isn’t ready for automation yet, we say so and show what needs to change first. Nobody has ever regretted fixing the upstream constraint before buying the machine that depends on it.
The Order We Work In
Map the flow
Material, information, people
Fix the constraint
Layout, balance, delivery policy
Then automate
Only what the process still needs
Smart Factory And Industry 4.0 Consulting
A smart factory starts with one machine fleet and one screen. Most of our digital factory work begins with an OEE dashboard and data collection across equipment of different vintages and OEMs, because that’s where the gaps between what the plant thinks is happening and what is happening show up first.
Our controls and software team in Grand Rapids builds on Ignition by Inductive Automation, which lets us connect PLCs from any manufacturer and put production data, AGV status, downtime and OEE on a single custom dashboard. For John Deere, we built exactly that: a plant-wide view in Ignition that operations and leadership now work from daily.
On the planning side, Visual Components is our primary simulation platform for layouts, throughput and material-flow animations, with FlexSim for discrete event modeling where the operation is fleet-based and non-uniform. The same models that justify the investment become the basis for the digital twin once the system is running.
Digital factory pilots are scoped like any other engagement: workshop, requirements, current-state assessment, interface design, then a working proof of concept on live equipment. If the pilot proves the data is worth having, the rollout plan follows. If it doesn’t, you’ve spent a fraction of a platform license finding out.
Request A Complimentary Automation Strategy Consult
Start with a 30-minute virtual conversation with the Factory of the Future team about where your operation is constrained and what you’re weighing up. Where it makes sense, we’ll follow it with a half-day site visit at no charge, so we’ve seen the floor before we talk about scope.