Things take hours to do. Fly a ship from Deimos to the commodity exchange at Antares Station? That's going to take 7 hours (like 7 _real_ hours). A smelter facility will take 10 real hours to smelt a batch of aluminum. You want to be a real good planner. Unless you like having to wait another day because you miscalculated the amount of flux needed to run your smelters, causing your aluminum production to run idle for half a day.
Where do you sell your goods? Well there's six commodity exchanges spread across the galaxy which accept one of the four currencies used in the galaxy (and yes there's FX markets). The bid/ask for goods varies so you'll want to decide where it may be optimal to sell (fuel isn't free!). You don't have to ship it yourself though, you can post a contract at your planet for someone else to ship your goods and deliver them within X days for a price.
This game is crazy. I have somehow ended up in a position where I now pay money to pretend to be a supply chain analyst and write my own ERP software. These are the scripts I use to run my company:
`csv.py` - converts exchange and inventory data to csvs
`production_line.py` - performs analysis of current production lines as described in `data/production_lines.json`
`analysis_increment.py` - Based on current production lines, gives a list of next building/recipe to invest sorted by ROI days
`analysis_multi_step.py` - Starting from current production lines, plots out the next several buildings/recipes to invest in based on their ROI days
`analysis_supply.py` - Gives a per-planet supply breakdown including planned productionn lines if included
`analysis_vertical.py` - Given a material ticker, returns an analysis of production lines with varying degrees of vertical integration to produce the given material.
`analysis_arbitrage_trip.py` - Takes origin, destination, capital, profit threshold, mass, and volume. Will give a list of materials to buy at origin at ask prices which then must be sold ASAP at destination bid prices