Amarr Locals Rejoice

Not sure if they are happy I am in system or leaving.  I guess might also be just a coincidence.

2018 Industry Goals and Milestones

After a little more than 12 months back in EVE I have achieved one of my initial goals of establishing a flexible, profitable and efficient industrial capability that continues to grow at a steady and manageable rate. The back end tools I created provide the necessary insight to guide production efforts that ensure target profitability is achieved. The use of ESI APIs has automated much of my previously manual activity that was needed to stay on top of market and sales performance.

Infrastructure stability has been extremely important for the last 8 months, highlighting the value of using services of a focused corporation (thanks Hedway). This has enabled levels of efficiency and optimisation to be met that would be costly and more risky using my own infrastructure.

 

Heading Home

 

Looking forward I have set some goals and milestones, most I am confident will be achieved. All continue to progress me towards my ultimate objective.

2018 Goals and Milestones

• Produce and sell first Capital Ship
• Establish complete Caldari T1 and T2 sub Super Capital Ship production capability*
• Establish complete Minmatar T1 and T2 sub Battleship production capability
• Establish complete Amarr and Gallente T1 and T2 sub Battlecruiser capability
• Increase Corporation assets by 200%
• Increase value of manufactured items sold by 100%
• Achieve a 40% sales profit
• Add two additional stations to increase market penetration

*Production capability includes required skills and ownership of required researched BPOs

Closing Out 2017

November has been a busy month as I prepare to build my final production run for the year. This has resulted in my largest purchase of materials in a single month (14.2b isk as of today). Those that know me will no doubt see me often in my mobile home below.  I do hope to get as many of the items on to the market as I can to see if I can exceed my personal goal of 100b isk of items built and sold this year.

 

A place to wait before ‘running the gauntlet’

 

Other than that, since my last post, I achieved a few minor milestones which include the production and sale of T2 destroyers and T1 cruisers. Next step will be the start of my battlecruiser BPO acquisition and research as well as T2 cruiser production (if I can find where there is some decent profit margins).

 

The first T2 destroyer off the production lines

 

Lifeblood Sales

The winter expansion has come and gone but it is fair to say from an industrialists perspective the market is far from settled.  As widely expected Tech2 moon goo continues to rise and it appears there are many market players snapping up Tech2 mods and ships in anticipation for general unit price increases.

As for me, I have been quite conservative the last two months.  At the end of August I purchased a large quantity of material for my September production run.  Since then I have not gone back to the market for anything other than listing my Tech2 products.  September sales were slow, resulting in the lowest month in 2017.  That can be attributed to most of the month being focused on invention and production activities.  October has been strong with the second best sales for the year.  There is no doubt this has been driven by Lifeblood with many modules being snapped up in bulk at high unit prices.  In a single day I sold 900m isk worth on Missile Guidance Computers at over 2.4m isk per unit.

Going into October I had approximately 18b isk of items on the various markets I use.  Today I have less than 8b isk up so now looking when to jump back into production.  This is likely to be in the next few days when the new refineries start pumping out minerals that have been hoarded by some groups.

This month I took some small steps towards one of my production goals with the purchase of my first two Capital BPOs.  While Capital production is down on my priority list it is nice to take the steps never the less.

In my last post I mentioned how I had recently started selling out of the Hedway Station in Keberz and anticipated sales growth.  I am sure the owner will be happy to see that this month it has now gone past Agil.

Hedway Market Data

The Hedway Station in Keberz has been a new addition to my market activities in recent months.  I will continue to feed it T2 modules as the owning Alliance provides fantastic industrial services for the little man in the EVE universe.  I look forward to see it the sales growth.

2017 Buy and Sell Data

I still have a way to go to get the data I want into PowerBI but now have all transactions since getting back into production as illustrated below.

At some point I will add specifics around the types of blueprints I own and the items I am buying in bulk (shown below).

Esi does it

Last night was a big break through for me and my use of ESI. For a few months now I had been having issues using the XML APIs to get data I cared about into excel, and then onto PowerBI, so I could slice and dice the data in all sorts of ways. As an industrialist being able to visualise market trends, production activity and growth is right up there with a PvP corp looking at killboards.

With the announcement of ESI and the planned demise of the older APIs, I knew I needed to invest some time and make the move. Unfortunately I'm not that technical and when I had a few brief looks at ESI I just could not get my head around how to use it in similar ways to what I was doing with the XML APIs. That was until I came across a post at Zansha Industries which told me all I need to know to do exactly just what I want. A big thanks has to also go to Steve Ronuken at Fuzzwork where the basis for the approach originated and where I sourced some of the static data.

Anyway so far I have just begun to play with my wallet transaction data to visualise my daily market sales, sales by location and two views of items sold as shown below.

This dashboard provides the ability to drill down on a specific item to see the total sold value over the period, how many units were sold, where they where sold and at what average price per unit.

Now that I know what I am doing with ESI I will build a few more dashboards over the coming weeks that will help track sales performance. I'll will also optimise a few of my spreadsheets which will make life easier as my production lines and inventory grow.

Public ECs – How to Do it Right

I have now been using ECs now for almost five months and overall have found the experience from a small industrialist perspective to be very good. In saying that I have also experienced the lows of using infrastructure that you have no control over. On two occasions this has come at a cost of a few million isk worth of lost production output and weeks worth of R&D due to EC owners leaving their ECs to run out of fuel and die.

These negative experiences took me back to my spreadsheets to work out how I could fund my own EC so that I could have a level of confidence and control over my activities. While part of me would like nothing more than having something I own sitting in space, like when I had my POS, I know I can't defend it or make it economically viable in the short to medium term.

All this thinking changed when by chance I started using a public EC run by a group who aim to provide a service to industrialists like me. While I still have no control over the infrastructure, the biggest change is the increased confidence I have in the service, which as a small entity is extremely important . Don't get be wrong I recognise risk is still there, as a 10 year vet of EVE you would be stupid to think otherwise. I often read about the safety of high sec, but like I have written about before, you are ultimately at the mercy those around you. The safest measure is to ensure you are not the most obviously tasty meal on the griefers smorgasbord.

So how did this group create that confidence – well it was done in a few ways but mainly through communication both in game and out of game. I also did my own research and checked out their website which is well done and highlights a level, for want of better words, professionalism. All my industry activities use their services – I hope that they are able to make a healthy profit and achieve their goals in the game. My own in-game quality of life has never been better.

Again I should state I have no affiliation with any group in EVE so calling these people out is nothing more than one player saying thank you and keep up the great service to another. So thanks Ikusaro and the The Hedway Network.

Still in Business

It has been a while since the last post largely because I have been having issues with my API extracts that has stopped my production analytics.  While frustrating, in game activity has not slowed.  As of today my original 1b isk seed investment has transformed into over 12b isk in the corp wallet, market sell orders and excess manufacturing materials.  Add to this over 30 new researched mod and ships BPOs.

Production and invention has moved to a single EC owned by another entity.  I have had some bad luck with my first two shutting down with the owners apparently leaving them.  While this has cost some isk through lost jobs, the corp remains well ahead in saved operating costs.  At some stage, if I continue to expand I’ll need to look at using my own EC but that is a while off by my calculations.

Engineering Complex Transition

Making the move to an Engineering Complex has been something that I have thought about off and on since getting back into production.  When taking a cursory look at EC’s I found it hard getting past the reduction in some of bonuses that I could get out of my POS modules.  In addition to the calculated fuel increase and difficulty I would have in defending my own structure in the event of an attack.

At Fanfest last weekend a slide was shown that made me have a closer look at things and reassess.  I had no idea that pretty much the rest of the industry base had moved – clearly I was overlooking something.

In the system I run my industry out of, there are a number of EC’s that provide all the services plus some.  While time to manufacture, invent and research might be slower and mineral efficiency not as good the advantages of the EC still come out on top.  These being mainly:

• asset security though the asset safety mechanism which is a major advancement from what I have sitting in my POS;
• increased convenience in being able to produce everything from the one location including components, mods and ships;
• increased profit from reduced operating costs by eliminating fuel expenditure.

The last one was what I missed first time around because I was always looking at owning and running my own EC.  At this stage my production does not warrant it and use of another corporation EC offsets the reduced ME in comparison to my POS. So taking all these things into account my move to an EC has begun with the first full production run to begin next week.

What will be interesting to see is how the numbers stack up.  In Q1 2017 I ended up selling 28b isk of Tech 2 items, 13b isk in March alone which well exceeded my monthly target.  Of this total, just under 50% of the value was sold from Amarr which will likely become my primary market hub.