Major consumers of sheet metal include automotive, aerospace, furniture, white and brown goods, electrical and body building. Parts produced here are in high volume which uses hard tooling. Raw material accounts for approximately 60-75% of the total cost. Research says that 80% of the lifecycle costs of a product are determined during design stage. Wastage of raw material is due to cracking, deformation, failure during manufacturing or due to improper sheet metal utilization.
To reduce wastage of raw material, defects should be reduced along with improving the sheet utilization.
Sheet utilization can be improved during design stage by checking the layout of the nested parts on the given sheet. As a simple example, we take a box which needs to be manufactured. There are various design alternatives through which a box can be manufactured. Given below are two design alternatives that will result in the final component (box). 
As a designer, it is not very intuitive which one of these will lead to better sheet utilization and hence lower cost and higher production rate. Using nesting algorithm, designers can check the utilization resulting from each of the above design alternatives.
From the layout it is very evident that the second design alternative is better as it can nest more number of parts on a given sheet.
As a second interesting case, a slight change in the design of the “C” as shown below, leads to significant jump in the sheet utilization.
The above examples clearly show that if the designer is empowered to visualize the layout of his design, he can take better decisions to improve sheet utilization without impacting the quality of the product. In future, we may see such design alternatives automatically being offered by the software tools.
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