Nesting is the process of arranging parts on a sheet of material — wood, metal, glass, plastic — to use as much of the sheet as possible and waste as little as possible. Think of it like a puzzle: you're trying to fit all your pieces onto the board with the fewest gaps.
Material is the single biggest cost in most fabrication operations. A shop buying $65 plywood sheets and wasting 25% of each one is throwing away $16.25 per sheet. At 10 sheets per day, that's $42,000 per year in pure waste. Good nesting can cut that in half.
At its simplest, nesting means trying different arrangements of parts on a sheet to find the one that uses the most material. You can do this by hand — moving parts around on a cutting diagram until they fit well. But manual nesting is slow, inconsistent, and almost always leaves more waste than algorithmic approaches.
Nesting software automates this process. You input your part dimensions and the sheet size, and the software finds an optimal arrangement. The best tools consider rotation, kerf width, edge margins, and even the future usability of remaining scrap.
If you're currently doing manual layouts, even basic nesting software will save you 10-15% material. Moving to advanced tools with field-based optimization and offcut preservation can save another 5-10% on top of that.