The current manufacturing system is clunky. After getting all the parts to a station, you need to take a mission to manufacture the product. When you're manufacturing in larger-than-one quantities, this starts to become annoying. Let's take the case of FFSA. You need to click atleast 8 times in total to manufacture a single XC load of FFSA. Each mission takes a few seconds to process, depending on your device. In short, you're spending time just sitting in a station taking the same mission over and over. This gets even more tedious when you have a Capship. Now you need to take the mission 16 times (if you have a Goliath) or 24 times (if you have a Trident). Now that's really annoying.

Another clunky feature is the inability of a built-in feature to see what resource is going to run out first if you continue manufacturing Product X. Plugins like Manu make this simpler, but an in-built system would be more efficient.

So, the suggestion:
A manufacturing UI as follows:
A dropbox to select which product you want to manufacture.
A box or a sliding scale to fill in the number of said product you want to manufacture.
A Max button similar to that in the Commodities tab, but this one is limited not by your ships cargo hold but by the resources available and free station inventory.
An alert to indicate which resource(s), if any, are insufficient for the selected quantity of product.

This would make the manufacturing experience a little less tedious and annoying than it currently is. I'd rather spend my time hauling stuff than clicking on the same two buttons over and over 8 times.

Also just another inconvenient feature of the current system. When you take a manufacturing mission and you don't have all the resources in inventory, it simply opens the mission log without telling you which resource in particular is insufficient. If it's a simple product like FFSA, that's fine. But when it comes to products with many parts, you have to go and cross check each and every commodity one by one, first from the mission log and then in your inventory. And, since there's no inventory search feature, it takes a long time to find said widget in your inventory. If you also happen to have a lot of other stuff stored up, so much the worse for you.

Previous suggestion(s):
Changes and/or additions to manufacturing
Auto Accept ( for Manufacturing Missions )
FCP/FFSA Missions

+1

+1. This is something I've been interested in aswell, but never suggested because it would require a new interface to be developed while the current UI is already on it's way to being overhauled, eventually. It would be nice to have, and can potentially lead into other new game mechanics like capship part blueprints.

-Also just another inconvenient feature of the current system. When you take a manufacturing mission and you don't have all the resources in inventory, it simply opens the mission log without telling you which resource in particular is insufficient.

You can simply undock and redock and it list will update in the mission log, but I agree, it should update instantly and not require extra steps for no reason.

Edit: I think if this were to be implemented, FCP and FFSA should have have a 5 second build timer per unit to prevent high load on the server.

I don't think it should take items out of the inventory instantly. That way, if it turns out you do have parts missing, you lose everything it has taken. If it is made such that the resources already given to a manufacturing mission are returned when the mission is aborted, this would be a good idea.

- If it is made such that the resources already given to a manufacturing mission are returned when the mission is aborted, this would be a good idea.

That's already how it works with the current system ^_^

+1