When I started in this game, every station had a build queue. You had to wait several hours for your ‘slot’ to open up. Total amount of items for a factory was capped, no matter the player count, forcing people to expand/conquer territory for more slots.
Now the lowest teir factory can have 100 players making 10 canes each in a day.
Implement queues for sure, automated? Only if CCP adds it to the client and not lock it behind how good a coder is in your alliance to make it a 3rd party app.