You are probably aware of the three R's related to waste management. Focusing on waste can help you to address high raw material prices, rising costs of hazardous waste treatment and disposal, and pressure to increase the sustainability of your operations.
Benefits of reducing waste
Improving waste management can benefit your business and the environment by:
reducing the cost of purchasing raw materials;
minimizing waste treatment and disposal costs;
increasing profitability (as wasted product equals lost profit), reducing environmental impacts associated with waste disposal and consumption of raw materials;
improving reputation of your business and employee satisfaction through promoting an environmentally responsible image;
providing a safer workplace through process improvements and less waste handling.
Using optimized cutting diagrams
Adopting a cutting diagram software to optimize board and sheet layouts is key factor to promote waste reduction. It is humanly impractical to guess how would be the best positioning of the parts over the board to produce more parts with less material.
This involves a complex combinatorial problem that must be solved by computers. Once everything is set, you will be able to produce cutting layouts in minutes.
What else can I do?
We understand that companies that cut sheets and boards should invest in reduce first. This way every following problem will be minimized. Less material to buy, transport, stock and handle in the shop floor.
To produce cutting diagrams with a low waste level, it is important to have several parts with different sizes at the same time. This will give the layout optimizer more possibilities of better fitting and distributing parts over the sheet.
What else do you do to produce more parts with less material?
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