Consumption driven Production
Ability to define minimum and maximum for any product.
if stock < minimum => produce this item
if stock > maximum => stop producing item
There could be a way to link specialized output stockpiles to a workshop. You can customize it to hold a very specific group of items(like any other stockpile)
This is how it would work: The workshop automatically queues the jobs necessary to fill the stockpiles it is linked to, until they are all full.
Example:
-You link a 6 tiles Drinks stockpile to the Still. The Still schedules 6 brewing jobs in order to fill the stockpile. When the stockpile is full the brewing is cancelled. When the stockpile is half-empty* the jobs are queued to fill it again... and so on.
This way production is directly linked with consumption, products are created only as they are needed.
Benefit:
This feature would allow the player to control the amount of items of each type that are available at any moment, and automatically synchronize the production rate with the consumption rate. The micromanagement would be greatly reduced. You just have to organize the production flow once and sit back, or make little adjustments if you need to.
A similar idea could also be implemented without using stockpiles. You could have a list with a max and min quantity for every product, and queu jobs in workshops as needed.
But I like the stockpiles more... I hope you like this idea.
*The trigger could be customized to fire when the stockpile is empty, half-empty, a %, ...