Science & Industry

It's been an intensive nine days of development to catch up to the changes of the Crius release, but finally I've deployed Eve Production Manager 1.6, which brings the following:

- Installation costs included in all calculations
- The best team bonus available in the factory system is applied to each applicable calculation

Development certainly isn't stopping, as auction costs are likely to become an important factor to many producers. However I thought it best to deliver enough functionality to bring most producers back onto the same level they were on as of 21 July.

EPM was borne of an idea to bring small producers onto a level playing field, and my first reaction has been that Crius might be termed Eve Online - the Hegemony Edition. However, I believe that a small producer can be agile enough to move his operation onto the coat-tails of a large producer and benefit from the teams he's paid for. I certainly hope that comes to be the case.

EPM 1.8 has been deployed.

- Building and selling in different regions now properly supported.
- Improved new user experience
- Numerous Crius-related enhancements and bug fixes

EPM 1.10 has been deployed, focusing on usability and process efficiency improvements

- Market-bound deliveries now start sooner, taking into account items that are to be immediately posted to market
- Production queue highlights low-profit items that are presently below your per-item minimum markup
- The relevant team to use now displays in the production queue
- Stale market prices are highlighted to avoid costly mistakes
- Team results report now allows you to enter a description to better identify what the team is for
- If you have multiple blueprints, they now participate in tandem for better factory efficiency
- Minor bug fixes

EPM 1.13 has been deployed with the following improvements:

- BPC per job additional cost now supported. This effectively opens up EPM to T2 producers.
- Minor bug fix

Just a side note that while documenting Team Auctions in the EPM User Guide, it seemed to me that a fair amount of it may be useful to a wider audience.

https://dbsoft.atlassian.net/wiki/display/EPM/Team+Auctions

EPM 1.16 has been deployed with the following enhancement:

- Team specialties now shown on the Team Results report.
- Bug fix

The Market Research Report has been enhanced to factor in each item's volume and inventory to arrive at an ordered list of profit expectation. It's hard to adequately describe how profound this report already is, as I have been feverishly running correlation analyses on my portfolio to capture the factors that best predict whether an item that's factory efficient is actually going to move in volume, and the top of this list is a who's who of so many items I've laboriously researched consuming ridiculous amounts of time previously. The key metrics are each item's average daily sales ("Volume"), aggregated inventory ("Competition") and margin ("Profit"), creating a clean, clear view into production candidates.

Eve Production Manager 1.24 has been deployed with the following enhancements and changes:

- RIP Teams :(
- LIVE MARKET DATA!!!! EPM has converted over to EVE Single Sign On and the CREST market feed.
- Process flow improvements
- Performance improvements: the time to refresh API data has been halved
- Bug fixes

Eve Production Manager 1.28 has been deployed with the following enhancements:

- Multiple players may be linked to an account to share production duties without sharing passwords.
- Post Buy Orders now shows a link on the item when in the IGB, which when clicked pops up a buy order window for that item.

Eve Production Manager 1.29 has been deployed with the following enhancement:

- Market Research Report and Build Items Report improvements

I've been working on squeezing every last efficiency out of what a single producer can achieve. Presently, it appears that the upper bound of 11 factory slots is about 15bil a month. Can that be improved?

As of 1.29, EPM sorts both the Market Research Report and the Build Items Report on an enhanced Profit Factor, which looks at the following factors:
- The upper bound of profitability is the lesser of Margin * Volume / Competitors and IPH * 1 day / Competitors. Examples:

400k Caldari Fuel Blocks sell per day at a margin of 1400 isk, for a total available profit of 560mil, divided by at present 19 competitors. In isolation, this would look very attractive, seeming to imply 29mil/day of available profit. However, a single slot can only produce 9.4mil in profits, which when divided by 19 competitors yields an expectation of only 500k per day.

In contrast, 5 Mobile Scan Inhibitors sell per day at a margin of 10mil, for a total profit of 50mil, divided by at present 2 competitors, implying an upper bound of 25/mil/day. A single slot can produce 8 units for a total profit of 80mil which exceeds 25mil, so the daily expectation is the full 25mil per day. Clearly this unit is a smarter BPO purchase or build than the fuel block, which is borne out by the fact that I've cleared 230mil on this unit this week.

Ultimately, profit is driven by how much profit can be squeezed out of a slot in a day against how many competitors are active, restricted to how many sell in a day. I believe EPM has this concept nailed, and the Market Research Report drills directly toward what BPOs to buy, and the Build Items Report directly drills to what to build.