Mechanic Guides

I am not going to rehash every little mechanic. For in-depth guides on specific mechanics, see links

Before You Begin -- About Industry in EVE Online

Unlike other MMO games, EVE Online has a non-instantaneous crafting system. Also, the system is bounded by game-skills: which limit the number of jobs and efficiencies, and in-game resources: which constrict throughput and logistic bandwidth. For the wholly uninitiated: EVE restricts maximum outputs by slots, and requires some investment in supply chain for supplying materials and exporting finished products.

These restrictions create a unique environment where real life manufacturing processes can be applied to a virtual world. The issues of human resources, equipment bandwidth, capital expenditures, shipping, and accounting all must be addressed. Though, being a game environment, there is a large amount of slack for those who do not fully optimize. This low-stakes environment means extremely lucrative returns can be extracted by applying real world tools.

The Tools

Characters -- Human Resource

A manufacturing line can only produce so much product/profit. High returns come from parallelism. Economies of scale appear as more characters work toward a common goal. There are two different restrictions that arise for human resource management; skills and time.

Skills

To participate in industry, certain in-game skills are required. This requires a certain player age (>3mo) and "leveling" (3-5M SP) to unlock the appropriate skills. This requirement is the easier of the two to handle, since all skills require in EVE is account time. A certain skill set must be complete before starting, but beyond that the actual mechanics do not require much insight/finesse.

Time

Time is the most precious resource; especially when a game is supposed to be recreation, and you are asking real people to give up their free time to your goal. This is the most challenging metric to optimize for. People have wildly different schedules, and EVE Online's systems do not fit well into normal human days. Beyond that, there may be a supply chain that is gated by some failure along the way, causing cascading backups. The very first metric to optimize in any large-scale operation is time, the rest will follow.

Player Owned Structures / Industry Slots -- Equipment Management

Equipment can either be public or private. These both provide different problems. In the case of public equipment, there can be a delay, from hours to weeks, before a slot becomes available. In the case of private equipment, there are issues of security, individual pieces of hardware to track, and drastically increased costs.