Cut optimiser allows management of offcuts generated during the cutting process. This allows maximum yield from source products and reduces workloads/cost involved in managing offcuts.
Optimiser Settings
Using the File|Optimiser Settings menu options you may choose different optimisation strategies that the system will use when using the cut optimise engine.
Quick/Medium and Deep Optimisation attempts to reduce the number of offcuts where possible. Speed is influenced by how deep the optimiser must try and place bars to reduce offcuts. It is left to the user as to which strategy to apply however these options should be chosen when time is short and more stock is to be used at a cost of greater numbers of offcuts being produced.
Optirefine and Adaptive Optirefine tend to use more offcut when available and should be chosen in slower production times when reduction of offcut is more preferable.
If you keep your cut sheets are relatively small, deeper refinements may be used as speed will not be affected as much. If your cut sheets are large you may prefer to use quick passes to reduce wait times.
Offcut Processing
When selecting products for a Shear line type device, the offcuts available to be used are displayed in the sources grid in the upper right hand corner of the application:
Offcut Length Breaks
Off cuts are held in system as an exact length but are displayed in the grid as a length break. In the above example bars between 3 and 3.499 metres are displayed as 3 metre only due to a break recorded of 500mm. The break can be modified using the Maintain|Offcuts option in the menu at the top of the application.
Filter the offcut by product and the length grouping or break can be seen in the box provided. Changing this value and pressing save will update the length break and re-present the offcuts shown in the new break length.
Minimum Offcut length by product
In a similar fashion, the minimum offcut length can be set individually for each bar type held in system.
By default, all source stock will be selected by default for use when calculating cut sheets. The selection can be manually changed if you require particular stocks to not be used.
Source Stock Priority
The Priority in the source stock determines the preferred priority for stock usage. A higher value indicates that it is the non-preferred source stock to use. By default, offcuts receive a priority of 0 (Highest priority) if the offcut is generated on the same day as the cut sheet being generated (ie the offcut is already present on the devices outward racks)
The priority for offcuts progressively increases (making them less likely to be selected in a cut run) as they age indicating that the offcut has probably been moved away from the device and is less cost effective to be used.
Priorities for both stock and offcuts may be manually overridden at any time however the new priority is not preserved between source stock refreshing.
This is useful for overriding the priority for stock lengths of special nature (ie 15 metre bar). The optimising engine will, by preference, select the longer bar if a stock length is to be used.
Setting its priority to a very high value (ie 1000) will ensure that the special stock will only be used when no other alternative exists.
Sample Use
We start the day with no 20mm offcuts and a plentiful supply of 12 metre lengths.
The first cut of the day produces 1 1080mm offcut and 1 8800mm offcut. Offcut length for N20 in this example is set to 1000mm with a length break of 500mm.
These offcuts will be recorded once the cut sheet is printed and yes is selected to the question "Do you want to update the offcuts?".
While the offcuts have been recorded with the actual lengths, they are displayed subject to the length break of 500 mm and appear as 1000mm bar and 8500mm bar.
The second cut of the day utilises the 8.8 metre offcut but will generate a further offcut of 5.8m:
As mentioned before, the offcuts are not recorded until the cut sheet has been printed and yes answered to the Update Offcut Quantities response.
Cut sheet print outs provide details of offcuts as well as stock bar to be used at the bottom of the report:
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