The Stocks tab contains the material available for cutting in the selected plan. Stocks may be sheets, panels, rolls, or reusable offcuts. Enter a fixed number of stocks or use unlimited quantities when planning how much material to purchase. You can also load physical stocks or predefined sizes from Inventory.
A plan stock is an input to one cutting job. An inventory stock is a reusable stock definition or physical quantity recorded under Materials. When you load an inventory stock into a plan, the program retains its inventory connection if it represents real material. This connection is used when closing and reopening the plan.
Entering and importing stocks
Press Ins or click Insert (+) on the navigator. Enter the stock length, width, and quantity, and optionally its cost and descriptive information. To import stocks, use Ctrl+I or Ctrl+J.
Stock fields
•# - Automatically assigned number, used for default sorting.
•Length / Width - Stock dimensions.
•Qty - Available quantity. Set it to Unlimited for a virtual stock size, such as a standard supplier size, whose quantity is not restricted in the plan. F2 can toggle the quantity between a numeric value and Unlimited.
•Used - Read-only number of pieces used in the optimization result.
•Cost - Cost of the stock. It can be entered per piece (pc), per area unit (a1), or per length unit (L1, L2, L3, L4, L9, for 1, 10, 100, 1,000, or 12 length units respectively). Length-based costing is also useful for rolls.
•Cost/pc - Calculated cost of one complete stock piece.
•Description, Note 1-4 - Optional stock information for identification, reports, or exports.
•S-Group - Stock-group identifier used by Group optimization to keep each part group within a common stock group.
•Storage - The original storage location of a real stock copied from Inventory; read-only in the plan.
•Mnf. date - Manufacturing date. Remnants retain the manufacturing date of their source stock.
•ID - Unique, automatically generated, read-only identifier.
To show, hide, or reorder columns, select View > Rearrange columns.
Using stock costs
Stock costs are optional. If different stocks have different costs, optimization tries to find a low-cost cutting solution, which may not be the solution with the least physical waste. You can also use costs as relative preferences rather than actual purchase prices: a lower cost makes a stock more attractive to the optimizer.
If you do not need cost-based selection, leave costs empty or use consistent costs for equivalent stocks. For example, you can specify several available stock sizes with unlimited quantities and let the program calculate how many of each size the job requires.
Press F4 to open Materials > Stocks, then press F4 again to load the material stocks into the plan. To exclude any material stocks from loading, uncheck their Mark flag.
Stocks with a finite inventory quantity represent actual material and retain their inventory connection. They cannot be freely changed as independent plan stock definitions. Stocks with Unlimited quantity are virtual templates, not physical stock on hand; they can be adjusted for the plan and do not belong to a storage location.
You can also load marked inventory stocks automatically when a plan is created or before optimization. Set this under Program options > Automation.
For maintaining stock quantities and storage locations, see Materials and Storages.