Preliminary nesting is an optional process that enables you to get a head start on sourcing materials that you need for a contract. It involves reviewing the items that you are going to fabricate, reviewing the material that you have available for the fabrication, and calculating a cutting plan that minimises material costs and wastage.
Before you make a start, then, you must have a preliminary list of the items that you need for the contract. Take a look at About preliminary listings for more information. The preliminary listing is a provisional list of the items that you are going to fabricate. This means that it is unlikely to give final accurate measurements and typically does not include fixings. More precise information is available when you receive a detailed listing from your client; at this point, you can repeat the nesting process with the final measurements and requirements.
You can source material from your inventory, suppliers, steel mills, outstanding purchase orders and theoretical offcuts (meaning the leftovers from other nesting processes). You can manually amend the cutting plan if necessary; when you are happy with it, you can reserve material for the contract, raise purchase orders for extra material that you need, or raise RFQs (Requests For Quotation) to send to suppliers to check cost prices and availability.
STRUMIS uses a wizard to guide you through the nesting and ordering process (see The Nesting Wizard). You can also nest manually (see Manual Nesting). Both methods draw on information from the item library and the supplier setup forms.