The paper highlights the problem of minimizing economic costs of making orders in the automated manufacturing system which consists of work centres arranged in a series. Each of them is equipped with tools which carry out defined manufacturing operations. Tools are replaced with new ones only when no manufacturing operation can be performed any more in order to minimize the residual pass. The equations of state of the production line are presented and heuristic control strategies are discussed in detail. The criterion is to minimize the number of replacement procedures which results in maximizing the use of tools in work centres. To prove the correctness of the presented approach the paper is supported with an extended simulation study based on implementing available combinations of either manufacturing or replacement strategies taking into account various configurations which come into being in the real manufacturing environment. The simulation results form the basis for the detailed analysis to meet the requirements of the applicable decision-making procedures.