Author Aylson Schoenung recently posted an informative article titled “5 ways that CAD/CAM nesting software impacts the bottom line” on thefabricator.com. We’ve summarized the article below highlighting the main points, but feel free to read the article in its entirety here.
In today’s market, fabricators are called to take on more small to medium volume jobs and turn them around in tight time frames with limited resources. This is asking a lot of these fabricators, and one way that they can meet their delivery dates is to rely more on automation, and relying on CAD/CAM nesting software to solve a range of needs. As manufacturing software evolves, CAD/CAM nesting software holds the potential to boost your operations in five ways.
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Material Utilization
Material costs are a large portion of fabricators operating costs, so any tool that can help to reduce that expense is likely to capture the attention of a shop owner or manager. Modern nesting software can contribute to higher material yields, through creating layouts on sheet metal that allow for neighboring parts to share a common edge. A common line cut reduces cut time, scrap, gas and in the case of certain cutting processes, consumables. Nesting software also offers strong part data management, sheet tracking, automated handling, and remnant inventory and utilization. These features allow you to maintain material records, sort and track separate jobs on a single sheet, and ensure part integrity and ISO compliance. It’s not unusual for a fabricator using a modern nesting software package to gain first year material cost savings of several thousand dollars.
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Production Efficiency
Using the latest manufacturing algorithms, CAD/CAM nesting software is able to deliver optimized cutting paths, pierces along with other fabrication factors to increase machine capacity, minimize cutting cycle time and improve part quality. Through all these factors a higher production efficiency is achieved.
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Labor Efficiency
The benefits of nesting software expand even more to areas beyond doing part layout on a sheet and scheduling machine time. These software have online data transaction systems that bridge nesting to ERP/MRP systems. This allows for automation of work order and inventory tracking and allows a company to save labor time per shift that used to be dedicated to individual workers trying to stay on top of job travelers and raw material stock. By using this type of software functionality, metal fabricators can expect an increase in production capacity without adding personnel or machinery.
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Data Management
This software also has features that allows for seamless integration into your fabricating operation. In short, if you were to import a design file for an entire assembly, the software will be able to separate all the individual parts of the assembly, determine the most efficient means of manufacturing, create the code for the machine tools to create those individual parts, and schedule the work. In addition, this total integration will allow your shops management to stay on top of material needs in real time.
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Manufacturing Automation
Today’s CAD/CAM nesting software can provide an automated concurrent manufacturing process. It can nest and automate a week’s worth of parts in minutes.
For all your nesting software needs, go to our sister site the cncrouterstore.ca, and check out the new and improved version of EnRoute’s nesting software EnRoute 6.
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