What is Nesting?

Nesting is the process of efficiently arranging multiple flat parts on a sheet of material to minimize waste and reduce material costs. It is a fundamental step in sheet-metal fabrication, woodworking, laser cutting, and CNC routing.

Any time you cut multiple parts in your CNC machine from single sheet of material, you need nesting.

Why Does Nesting Matter?

Material is often the largest cost factor in manufacturing. A good nesting algorithm can cut material waste by 20–40%, directly improving your profitability without changing anything else in your workflow.

Types of Nesting

• Manual nesting – Arranging parts by hand. Time-consuming and often inefficient.
• Rectangular nesting – Parts are placed in bounding boxes. Fast but wasteful.
• True-shape nesting – Parts are fitted together at their exact outlines, including concave shapes placement.
• Part-in-part / island nesting – Smaller parts are placed inside holes of larger parts, maximising utilisation further.

Dekupeo Nest uses true-shape nesting with part-in-part support for best material utilisation.

Challenges of Nesting

Nesting is a complex combinatorial optimization problem. The number of possible arrangements grows exponentially with the number of parts, making it computationally intensive. Dekupeo Nest uses an efficient heuristic algorithm to find good solutions in a reasonable time.

How Dekupeo Nest Works

Dekupeo Nest reads your DXF files, detects all cut contours, and runs a true-shape placement algorithm with configurable part spacing, rotations and several other parameters. Results are displayed as an interactive sheet view you can export for production.