Whether your business manufactures furniture from concept to sale, be that for kitchen, bedroom, bathroom or office, or supplies panel products such as kitchen and bedroom doors to the fitted furniture industry the production process centres around producing a series of cut parts from stock material. Cutting optimisation systems have been integral in such production planning for many years; replacing the time-consuming and often inaccurate manual calculation of cutting plans.
Whilst all optimisers available on the market are proud of their maximum yield/minimum wastage solutions, as are SECANT, should this really be all that is of concern when optimising production? Financial gains through savings in material can be rapidly lost through additional processing time at the saw. When cutting bar or beam this could be due to inefficient use of the full cutting capacity of the saw, or through multiple changes of part length within the same pattern, whilst for panel and sheet time can be lost through overly complicated patterns containing multiple turns and recuts.
The highest yields and the most efficient saw usage can generally be achieved by allowing an optimiser to freely combine any of the piece sizes in the cutting list. However, such patterns may result in an unacceptable amount of work in progress where at any time a large number of orders are partially complete. SECANT can constrain the result so that pieces are produced broadly in line with a production schedule, or to meet the production requirements downstream of the saw.
With its state-of-the-art cutting optimiser, you have the capability to generate solutions tailored to balance material yield against production time. This balance may vary depending on the cost of material being cut, the lead time for the product, or the capacity of the factory at any time. SECANT Enterprise can also display the user a list of solutions where this balance is varied, allowing the user to choose for themselves the most appropriate cutting plan for the current requirements of the business
