If you have much of your basic stuff in barrels you may want to get a bunch of 1k or 4ks for each block like dirt, cobble, sand, etc. Preformat everything that is a basic resource too like ores and gems. Make a better than your average storage cell for stuff you think you will have a lot of, and have maybe 8-12 types per storage cell. More items per cell makes it less efficient to keep that in mind.
Once some of this is preformatted have a couple of ME import buses set to import stacks at a time. Use a portal gun to grab and drop barrels onto the import buses. Have a crystal chest or two nearby set to a high priority to take any overflow in case your borked a preformat somewhere or didnt get a big enough cell.
Things like mod chests (chest you dump things from a single mod into for convenience) can stay in chests and connect into the network that way. For added measure there is a button you can click to set the filter to only allow items into that chest from the AE network that are currently already in the chest (can be reconfigured).
Make some ME monitors and setup common stuff you used to grab from barrels. Hit the monitor with a wrench to lock the monitor to that item. Drop it in then add the conversion matrix to the monitor, now you have an ME barrel equivelent. The left and right click stuff is slightly different from the barrels, but the functionality is all there.
Setup a large MAC behind a dark cable and a smaller MAC behind another dark cable. The big MAC is for making stuff you will want on demand. Stuff like TE machine frames, glass panes, gears, etc. The little MAC is for stuff that will be used automatically by other machines. Stuff like bee frames come to mind. Then when you arent actively using the crafting, you can switch off the big MAC and save power, and the little MAC can happily continue to automatically fulfill item crafting requests you may have in your network.
I also added an iron switch from the switches mod because I think that looks much better than a lever when it sits near AE stuff. It has a green light when active, and red when inactive (easy to tell from a distance). I have a master switch on the TE3 hardened energy cell that powers the ME controller so I can switch off the whole AE network while I'm away as I dont currently have finite power sources and no crafting upkeep needs. In the future I may have cyclic assemblers to fulfill this kind of need as they require a lot less power to maintain than having all the cable and infrastructure.
Is that what you were looking for?
