PEP Nesting Shop Floor Lasers

similarities between an example that was provided and one that his company had spent 19 hours quoting and had lost. The job, which included 51 parts, five materials and 167 parts nested, only took PEP one hour to quote. Is programming for the fiber laser any different than programming for a CO 2 laser? There are many differences between programming for CO 2 versus a fiber laser, yet it makes no difference to the PEP software. A PEP customer simply selects the machine type, and the software does the rest – generating the appropriate nest. One of many advantages to the fiber laser is the ability to cut faster. Faster cutting, however, requires slicing up skeletons and cutouts to enable safer cutting and easier part removal. PEP has two special routines called Destruct cutting and Scan cutting to take advantage of the fiber faster cutting capabilities. Quoting the job one way and then cutting it another makes no sense and makes it hard to compute whether a profit is made. To be accurate, the quote has to reflect the way that the parts will eventually be cut or the profit margins will be off. Measurement Masters Inc./PEP Technology 41 January/February 2018 Destruct cutting is a process where the software develops a cutter path after the parts are nested to slice up cutouts based on the cutout size and rotation of the cutout in the nest. Doing the destruct cuts after the parts are nested reduces the amount of destruct cutting required. Scan cutting is used for cutting grids of circles, rectangles and other shapes. Scan cutting develops a cutter path that cuts individual geometry using pierce and cut technology; this eliminates the de-acceleration and pausing in corners. Beyond the examples provided here, PEP Technology offers users a host of additional methods for achieving advanced productivity. When fabricators place as much attention on nesting activities as they do other processes within their shop, the opportunities for substantial savings are great. by taking a close look at their costs of manufacturing. After examining the benefits that could come with PEP software, it was discovered that the company could get as much as a 19.6 percent increase in material savings and a 50 percent speed-up in feed rate – from 800 ipm to 1,300 ipm. The company was looking for a material yield of 90 percent and nests that were created automatically. Initial nesting tests included cutting 65 of the customer’s parts – with one part nested per sheet. The PEP code processed 0.070-in.-thick sheets of production parts at 1,300 ipm. The competitive software could only cut the parts at 800 ipm using the same tech tables. In this situation, no common cutting was involved. Another example is based on quoting speeds in addition to time and material savings. A customer realized he needed to quote faster and more accurately to win more jobs. During a training class, the customer noticed