Sure, compared to systems like fate, Marvel Heroic Roleplay, Feng Shui and Truth & justice (pdq) it might feel slow, but those are tough comparisons and hard to beat. Ffg star wars is by no means a slow game. And every combat situation doesn't have to be a full combat encounter with initiative order and all that! You can use a single skill roll for combat too, as explined in the alternate rules in the CRB. Was it in the gm chapter?...

Edit: With narrative dice, the system also shows that the mechanics focus on other things than fast mechanics. This game is narrative and has storytelling/improv tools to get across the gameplay experience they are going for.

All while incorporating labyrinthine character and gear builds which serve to facilitate players vacillating over what to do and with what, and compared to that, determining initiative is child's play! /sarcasm

I pre-roll initiative for NPCs with whom I expect trouble, but heck, I think I might add a "pre-rolled initiative" field to each NPC in my GM holocron.

I delegate initiative tracking to a player so I have fewer bookkeeping items.

Some really good ideas here, I might have to try something new!

Something you might do is have everyone pre-roll some initiative checks of both types and use those when combat starts. It'll speed things up, but I'm not a fan of that system, because I love to stack Boosts or Setbacks on initiative checks due to circumstance. Last night, for instance, a couple of beasties snuck into my party's camp and were trying to snack on our Twi'lek who was on watch. She failed the Perception vs. Stealth check, so she couldn't shout a warning, so everyone who was asleep got 3 setback, everyone got 2 for the darkness, and the beasties got 2 Boosts because they had surprise.

Hard to do that using pre-rolled initiatives.

This is what I do, and it definitely lets us get into combat earlier. Before the session starts, at the same time people are settling in and rolling Destiny and whatnot, I ask for two Cool and two Vigilance checks from each player. I think group these together based on the order of the rolls. So I've got two groups of each type. I do these pre-rolls for NPCs too since I usually know who or what the likely combat NPCs are going to be.

When combat starts, I ask one player to roll a D100: 1-50 grabs group 1 of whichever type they need, 51-100 uses group 2 of the rolls. And off we go! I've never needed more than two of either type during a single session.

Doing it like this has worked WAY better for us in terms of getting the combat started and not interrupting the flow from how they got into combat and the actual combat itself. However, like Absol noted, the disadvantage is that you can't really adjust the initiative dice pools based on circumstances on the fly. This hasn't been a problem for us, as any Boosts or Setbacks are just applied during the first round of combat rolls, not the initiative rolls themselves.

Oh, and I almost forgot I created this!

http://initcalc.imperialnet.net/

Works well for online sessions, but obviously in person sessions are probably better off not using online tools.

This could be a helpful reference to speeding up combat: http://theangrygm.com/manage-combat-like-a-dolphin/ and making it more exciting

I agree that it does cause a break for a short time.... But, it's minimal. We have PC and NPC cards. Just white with the Rebel symbol, and Black with an Imperial symbol. I put them in card sleeves and a player just writes down the numbers on each card with a dry erase as the other players call them out. They just throw it into order on the table and away we go. It doesn't take very long at all.

This could be a helpful reference to speeding up combat: http://theangrygm.com/manage-combat-like-a-dolphin/ and making it more exciting

Really not a fan of his writing style or the way he comes across... words and phrases repeated one after another, no sense of when and when not to use capslock, how he tries to pass things off as being matter of fact but taking hundreds of words (I guess thousands going off what he wrote in the article) to get to the point.

He does have a point though, and for systems that are more number crunchy like DnD I think that's great for him to remind GM's to actually narrate things.

For this system, that's kind of a given. Everyone should be involved in the narration process. It takes a while to get people new to RPG's to get comfortable with narrating their actions in combat I've noticed, so I started narrating here and there for them, to give them a sense of how to do it. I also try my best to narrate the NPC's actions. I'll be reminding and encouraging players to narrate their actions more if they like, as this system is designed with narration in mind before game mechanics.

Initiative is a bit more complex in this system compared to the flat numbers of DnD. It can take a few minutes for me to slot in adversaries between the players due to dice rolls that result with the same amount of success and having a second thing to break ties (advantage). This tends to kill off the excitement of combat and like I said earlier, I plan to employ the optional once per session roll for players and I believe I should start rolling and recording NPC initiative ahead of time as well.