Swedish producers of wooden single-family houses have for a long time being accused of lagging behind other industries in terms of production technology. In the emergence and the spreading of concepts like Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing, new technologies are available, with the respective automated equipment. Some companies have already invested in such, e.g., automatic stud fitting or multi-functional bridges. Others are about to do so, or at least seriously reason and reflect about it. In order to make an appropriate investment decision, a company has to consider different factors and thoroughly discuss and evaluate them internally. The aim of this single case study is to identify the factors the case company used as decision-criteria for investing in a higher degree of automation or not, and how the responsible managers reasoned on each factor before the final decision was made. The empirical material was gathered by deep interviews and the result shows seven factors of mportance: investment costs, operating costs, production capacity, flexibility, quality, spaceand working environment. After comprehensively debating and evaluating those factors, the company decided against a higher degree of automation in favor of more manual work. This shows that automated operations and the use of new technologies is no end in itself.