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Time/complexity formula for work processes

A price of a good or service is an abstraction, it needs to capture cost of materials and time spent by individuals. It also needs to encompass profit In a very complicated world, we don't use software enough to encode all costs and time used and complexities. Our accounting is snapshots of costs but I think jobs can be studied and encoded in a computer system and used to calculate prices.
 
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In computing we use big o notation to work out what the costs of an algorithm are. For example, if you needed to deliver 100 parcels to 100 cities, there is a path between the cities that is efficient and this problem is NP Hard to calculate as there is so many different permutations of visiting each city. This is the travelling salesman problem.

The average company has tens of different computer systems with each their own features and requirements for usage. They also require certain skills to use such as office administration and information processing. Nobody wants to pay for training for this

What if you had a data format which encoded all these systems and the relationships between them and modelled the business processes and interactions between each system. You could work out or estimate the time cost and intellectual complexity of the business and you could therefore do accurate capacity planning and resourcing levels.

If you've used Business Process Modelling and Notation you know you can execute encoded business processes with a computer system.

The human element is not encoded but big data collection systems could capture data from employee emails, system usage and track it in a business case tracking system.

Elastic Prices could be calculated and you are guaranteed profitability. You could calculate that one customer uses very little resources but another customer uses a lot. You could charge that person more as they're more costly to provide services for.

chronological, May 20 2022

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       You need to factor in desirability and demand, and willingness of the customer to pay for the service offered.
pocmloc, May 20 2022
  

       //You could calculate that one customer uses very little resources but another customer uses a lot. You could charge that person more as they're more costly to provide services for.//   

       All kinds of problems with this. Discrimination charges, difficulty in accurate tracking, the customers feeling screwed over if they get charged more even though it costs more to provide service. And taxis already charge by the mile and some hair-dressers by the difficulty of the do, and massage parlors by the time and expertise required, and airlines by the level of service demanded...
Voice, May 20 2022
  

       All this is true [voice]. I suppose the potential customers who would be put off by this pricing structure will go elsewhere, leaving you with only the subsidised customers, and you will go bust. Unless of course you set the "baseline" price cynically high so that the "discounts" still bring you down to a profitable level.
pocmloc, May 20 2022
  

       I feel like I am being subtweeted here with both:
//You could charge that person more as they're more costly to provide services for//
and
//Unless of course you set the "baseline" price cynically high so that the "discounts" still bring you down to a profitable level//
  

       Which is another way of saying that the simplest approach to charging by complexity is to charge by time spent on the work, which is what professional services firms have been doing for so long as there have been professional services firms.   

       Anyway, I don't really understand the idea? Modelling job costs in a more detailed way to allow for more accurate quoting? I think that the biggest variable for the cost of providing prof'l services is "What is the client like?", really, and I am not sure how you can encode that, unless the model is complicated enough to account for personality types (individually and collectively).   

       That will be six guineas.
calum, May 20 2022
  

       In computer science we have big O notation to estimate the complexity of an algorithm.   

       I want an estimation of work done that is fairly objective similar to my calories based salary on this website.   

       Some jobs are so tedious and costly from a time perspective and others are really straightforward and just need someone to work through them to get the work done.   

       Hard problems are similar to scales where you need to keep everything balanced to solve the problem with your resources available. SAP software has planning and optimization components but I think the idea could be generalized. Business process modelling is a baked thing that exists but I don't think there are mathematical formulas for work complexity or even a procedure for encoding business processes for complexity and work analysis.   

       Any analysis of the work day has to incorporate the unavoidable 30 minutes waiting for computers to do things from switch on and log in and to checking emails
chronological, May 20 2022
  

       //I suppose the potential customers who would be put off by this pricing structure will go elsewhere, leaving you with only the subsidised customers//   

       IMO it's not the price but a high price combined with having to rub elbows with the have nots.   

       //formulas for work complexity //   

       But as you pointed out tedium is a huge part of many unpleasant tasks. It's not just the complexity, but tasks being stretched out over longer periods of time requiring continuous focus on something unpleasant.
Voice, May 20 2022
  

       There must be an approach that hides the unpleasantness of boring work and replaces it with something enjoyable.   

       The doing one thing enjoyable but actually driving something boring.
chronological, May 21 2022
  

       This seems to reward people for finding the hardest and most pointless way to do anything.
RayfordSteele, May 21 2022
  

       Being subtweeted again I see, thanks Rayford.
calum, May 24 2022
  

       There is a 1 million dollar prize to prove that P=NP in the travelling salesman problem.   

       The "largest solved problem of 24,978 cities in 2004"   

       Surely the answer lies in having parallel processes follow each combination simultaneously, but stopping as soon as the shortest route finishes?
4and20, May 30 2022
  
      
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