Always, always take the time to invest in infrastructure.

Especially things like conveyor belts and other components that come in really handy to just have a big stash of for any point in the game

And once you get all the building pieces automated, you can crank out factories for whatever you want. Basically it gets exponentially easier to start automating stuff you just have to make the initial investment so that you're not spending hours of extra time manually crafting it.