A two-day workshop activity is described in which postgraduate students are introduced to (i) the theory and application of Design-of-Experiments (DOE) approaches and (ii) the implementation of affordable automation technologies and related data analysis of a system of catalytic interest. This work involved the design and delivery of a short lecture to introduce the theory of DOE followed by practical demonstrations of the application of automation technologies. Specifically, a fractional factorial design was used to interrogate the input space-base, solvent, temperature, time-of the Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling (SMCC) of