In recent years, manufacturing industries has become very cost effective to remain competitive in market, and it became mandatory to provide various kind of product in short span of time.

In fabrication industry, while working on cost effectiveness of weldment; primarily welding process, and Weld quality has remained focus area. Along with weld cost or process cost, it has been analyzed that material cost has played crucial role for cost reduction. Thus, it has become vital to focus on sheet metal cut part processing (Nesting & bending) and planning.

To achieve the cost goal, cut part nesting and nest planning should be managed suitably. For better cut part processing, nesting is done to design the optimal use of raw material. Nest planning or scheduling is done in order to fulfil the due date of product.

While designing nest for optimal use of raw material; product mix, product annual usage, kitting ratio, sheet sizes, part orientation, secondary operation easiness, ease of part sorting and operator safety have remained key attributes to design effective nest.

Nesting and scheduling are affected with each other and they offer certain trade-off between them. Therefore, nest design approach with all attributes should be considered in order to achieve cost effectiveness goal.

Under such understanding, we have proposed unique method of nest designing and nest planning.

In its procedure material master is set with certain attributes to make planning process easy. Then, it helps in generating plan or schedule orders for prime nest. Based on consolidated annual usage and product mix, nesting design is executed by using set rule for sheet size, part orientation, sorting easiness and secondary operation easiness with operator safety.

Finally, to validate improvement and cost effectiveness we developed Microsoft Excel based utility to calculate projected savings for newly designed nesting as per changed qty and nest scheduling.

We implemented this strategy for few key thicknesses and compared result with previous conventional design in terms of reduction in number of steel plates, steel variants and saved raw material in terms of MT. To validate new nest effectiveness, yield rate is also compared between the new and previous nesting sets.

This article is shared by Sachin Hase from John Deere India Pvt. Ltd.