Hope you approve. Suggestions welcome:
I love it. Will that be on 1.08?
Looks nice… 
What does the “Square Meters per Vehicle” mean?
Like how much building space one is wasting to produce one vehicle? Or how is it calculated… xD
SQM is probably like the factory footprint. How much space is used to build that car.
Yup, it basically divides the factory area (unlocked areas) by the car production/hour, and is a metric of how well you are using the space. Apparently its a metric used by real car factories (I’m reading a book on factories and automation :D).
Yes this is all implemented ready for 1.08. I may add to it, or put it in as it is and see what people think.
I guess most companies do something like that… probably every company that has some sort of production line even if it’s not related to cars in particular. They all like to cram in as much stuff into an area as possible… rent isn’t cheap, building a factory building isn’t cheap either. But I think for our purposes it’s only a performance indicator which makes various factories comparable even if they are very differently sized.
Eventually there should be more stuff like that, because that’s stuff that encourages people to build better, more efficient factories… around certain principles… which maybe could be used for true Mission Goals/Campaigns or just for players to compare to one another.
Maybe the power demand could also be factored in somehow as a metric… especially if some of the Slots would drain idle power because Lights don’t pay themselves… And some may even have reason to keep fully powered, like if you are casting/molding motor parts or something then it will draw even power when idle to keep the aluminum/steel or other materials in a liquid state even if you are not producing anything.
Hey,
I’m not sure if I’m an exception but … Okay, let me try to explain from the beginning.
The primary question (related the Efficiency Statistics) is: Why do I need such a tool.
Regarding to my personal challenges in this game and work experience there are 3 answers:
I want to know at which point I am atm.
I want to see if the changes I made in the near past are successfull.
I want to see how critical my production line is.
This leads me to the next questions:
Which indicators would show the wanted informations?
In which kind of presentation would point out the collected informations in the best way?
The answers may not supprise (or do they?):
One indicator is aleady implemented: The running time ratio of the actual Efficiency Statistics
The next (for me) is the vehicle production per hour (as suggested) or hours/minutes/seconds between shipping two cars.
A third indicator is the number of errors and warnings per game cycle to measure if breaks will raise, stay at level or get less.
A fourth is the number of completed tasks per game cycle. It indicates the existance of bottlenecks as well as the total performance unrelated to cars.
A fifth indicator is the mentioned ‘Slots Running’ ratio because it would tell me if my production line achieves a constant flow.
The last indicator I’ld like so see is the number of items in Resource Importer queues at the end of a game cycle to see if the resource conveyor layout needs improvements or an additional importer is urgent.
Regarding the presentation I prefer graph like already in use: line or stacking line graph for the development over the near past and a pie graph (best with the numbers at each pie piece) to see the latest values/ratios. At the point the informations can be shown either as % or as number - or in case of cars per hour and h/m/s per car - a small slider to switch between both would be great.
The ‘Square Meters/Vehicle’ is more related to finance and bank loans. Same with a wages to total cost ratio which is often a criterion how risky a business could be (hail the rating agencies …).
So finally I hope (as all the times) nothing got lost in translation.
Thanks for your interest and efforts
You mean like a graph that shows in the near past how many slots finish their work each second or something? And if there are sudden drops in the graph it would indicate a bottleneck somewhere in the production line?
Oh that would be cool to have. There are quite often bottlenecks related to Resource Importers… so having some sort of indicator in the efficiency window for that would help.
That’s right! 
it did occur to me today just when fixing a bug in the vehicle stats, that it would be quite easy to include a stat which showed total expenses divided by total car sales, in say…the last hour. That should give you an idea of a target sales price.
The question then is do I exclude capital expenditure in that calculation. I would suggest yes, but obviously it has to be paid for eventually. Maybe we need a configurable depreciation time to make that calculation…but then are we getting a little bit too much like ‘accountancy sim’ and not fun?
I would not want the capital cost included. I want to know if the cost per car is going down or up. To get cost with capital cost you could divide the number of lifetime cars vs lifetime expenses.
I also think that everything that is related to costs/finances should probably be in the finance tab.
Usually the cost calculation is simplyfied by a ratio regarding the material cost. I thinks this would be enough ‘SimFinance’ in Product line. Better way and as I know often done is to balance the cost for machinery etc. by the profit. So better ensure a fair premium discount than wasting time for knowing the last Cent of costs of a car. The necessary ratio can be calculated by taking the costs for rent, wages etc. and setting them in relation to the number of manufactured cars in the same time.
I have thought about something else to consider for the production stats:
- The amount of different design variants produced in a given time frame (like in the past hour)
- The amount of different design variants produced per given area.
A factory that is able to output more design variants is considered a lot more flexible, especially to adapt to different market price ranges and to individual customer needs.
A factory that is only able to produce 1 design variant is actually very rigid and would rank quite low in such an index, even if the slots are crammed as tightly together as possible.
Currently there are 34 different upgrades available and therefore hypothetically there are currently 2^34 = 17.179.869.184 possible combinations… which nobody is going to do anyways… but having something between 64-512 variants is totally do-able as I have proven with one of my 1.07 savegames.
Stats of useage for importers would be intresting.
how many % of total capacity is used?
Indeed that’s a good point. Seems weird to split stats, but some are clearly ‘production’ stats whilst others are financial I guess?
I agree. The Financial Dept. may have it’s own as it is very often split up in real life. Everything related to production and logistics perfomance is one department and marketing & sales are a second one. The wages and finance stuff are sometimes related to their own departments or just a part of the other two.
So back to the game: I either take care of the perfomance and total output or scaring about the monay I loose at buying components and paying wages. But maybe others may handle it in a different way …
Kind regards
On a factory wide level, I want to know:
- Which components am I paying the most for?
- What slots are most/least utilized?
- If I’m waiting on resources, which resources am I waiting on?
These would help me identify bottlenecks and points where I could increase efficiency.