Won the job? The nesting is already done.

Nesting on real stock is different from nesting on a catalog

Most nesters ask what size sheet you want and lay parts on an idealised rectangle. That produces a nest that is efficient against a sheet nobody has. Lasertally Nest starts from the rack: the sheets in the building, and the offcuts left over from every job before this one.

Two rules govern which piece it reaches for. Oldest first, so material does not age out in a corner. And the shortest piece that can still do the job, because spending a full sheet on a part a remnant could have carried is how a rack silts up with pieces that are too small to use and too big to throw away.

Cut order is a safety rule, not a preference

The moment a part's outline is finished, it is loose. A loose part in a sheet can tilt, and a tilted part is in the path of the cutting head. Lasertally Nest treats that as a hard constraint: holes are cut before outlines, wraps before end cuts, so nothing is freed until everything that had to be cut inside it is done.

The same pass applies the cutting technology: lead-ins placed where they will not scar the part, kerf compensation so the finished dimension is the drawn dimension, and micro joints where a part needs holding.

The metal is booked when the program is written

Writing a program draws the stock off the rack once and records it against the job. Re-printing the same program does not draw it twice, which is the failure mode that makes inventory counts drift until nobody trusts them. Whatever usable material is left goes back on the rack with its own tag.

The quote is already the nest

A won quote crosses into Nest carrying its parts and their geometry, so nobody redraws anything and nobody re-imports a file that was already read once. Bent parts cross over as their flat pattern automatically, which is the shape that actually gets cut.

Output is layered DXF for sheet, so any CAM package that reads DXF can take the nest. Tube gets its own outputs, covered on the tube nesting page.