It’s kind of a complex problem.
Any industrial operation cost several resources, and produces several resources. The goal is to gain most of one or several resources while minimizing the loss of others.
The resources consumed(the cost) include
- materials used in the industry run of course
- your time to set the runs, orders on market, optimization process, etc.
- Your time to build the resources you wanna sell
- isk immobilized in each run (taxes, market taxes)
- isk and time required to move the goods
In this case, since you separate the mining activity from the industrial activity, the time to mine resources is not relevant. However this means the cost of materials becomes the loss from not selling those materials to orders instead of your product.
Since you would sell those mats to HS anyhow there is no difference in cost of “rolling the hole to go jita”. So we assume it is 0.
How to evaluate the cost of the materials you use ? Well it’s from the ore you mine. If you have compressed veldspar, then the cost of tritanium is the benefit you would have to sell the compressed veldspar in Jita. For other minerals used for a run, you can either use a complex method involving comparing the % of each required minerals to the one produces by refining your ore, or take the whole refined minerals as the total cost of your operations (then it is constant: you have one operation that builds several items from the minerals) and try to make as much of the minerals as you can.
Then there is the transport issue.
For this you have an interesting tool : haulers. You can roll a hole to HS (close to jita), drop your stuff in a station, then contract the stuff to Jita and sell it on an alt. In that case you have an additional cost as a % of the expected sell(collat tax), as well as a cost that scales with the volume of items(vol tax). Personnally I set a fixed 5% cost of my items, and then depends on your friends for hauling but you want to have a maximum value of isk/m³ you can accept - typically fo up to 10j around I would go 10 isk/m³
So then it’s up to you how you compute the price of items. Let’s say you consider direct order (so only taxes -assuming 1%) then the price of your ore is the current BO from jita , minus 1% market tax(so * 0.99), minus your collat tax (here * 0.95), minus volumic price (here 10 * volume). This estimated price is actually the COST of your ore, if you consume it.
If you start runs, then you will consume some ore, and additionally the job cost from industry index, as well as industry lines ; and you produce an item that can be sold to Jita with the same exact formula used above. It’s important to use the same formula otherwise you can’t compare them.
So now, I take the sell value, remove the costs, and divide all by the time required to do the job, and it gives me the isk/h of selectd job. I do this for all bpo I have, then sort them by isk/h. this tells me which bpo are worth or not.
In your case, you may fine-tune the hauling cost to take into account the number of jumps you have to make to move the product to HS.
I personally over-estimate the cost and under-estimate the benefit because it’s the only way to have a correct idea of the benefit. People who underestimate the cost and overestimate the benefit tend to lose money.
