6 Simple Steps to building a Manufacturing spreadsheet

For Eve Industrialists, it's a giant spreadsheet. But anyone who's ever built a spreadsheet knows that you have to conceptualize it in your head before you build it. Sure, the randomly sprawling, ad hoc development CAN work. But generally it results in a hodge podge that only one person can effectively use and becomes harder and harder to make changes to. So what should your spreadsheet focus on? Here's a list:

1) Profit calculation: This is the king and it all should be focused towards this goal. There's a number of items that play into this, however, that you'll want to take into account.

2) Profit Margin: This is the easiest one to calculate (although Eve's math rubric makes it decidedly non-trivial) and it's arguably the most important. Generally, you should have SOMEWHERE on your sheet that tells you which items are highly profitable and then you should explore them as construction options.

3) Production time: This is the length of time it takes to produce. It does you no good to do something that creates $200million isk if it took you 10 steps across three weeks. There were probably better things to build.

4) Sales volume: This is a commonly forgotten item. You don't want to be single-handedly doubling the supply of a product. If you do, you'll either slow wayyyy down the sales rate or you'll lower the price (or both).

5) Chain management: This is one I've been guilty of ignoring and I'm trying to rectify in my own spreadsheet now. Ask yourself, "What's the most efficient slot allocation I can handle?" Can you structure your manufacturing jobs to go in 24 hour increments? What would such an arrangement look like.

6) Chain Management part 2: T2 ships are a great example of proper chain management. Is it more efficient to build the best margin ships from each faction and focus on armor plates and microprocessors? Or is it better to built exclusively one faction's ships and build the entire T2 chain? I don't know. But a great industrial spreadsheet would help you figure it out.

Ultimately, it needs to pass the test of usability. If it's not giving you easy access to data, you should consider stripping it down for parts and rebuilding a new one. I'm in the process of developing a cheat sheet. Something I can print out and read from that tells me my target buy prices for the things I want to buy, build quantities for the things I want to build and sell price for the things I want to sell. That way I avoid alt+tab-itis. Those kinds of usability items are nice to have.