When it comes to sheet metal fabrication, it’s easy to focus purely on materials, machines and your staff, and overlook how improving the cutting process can be to your budget and workflows.
Yet, small errors in cutting or managing offcuts often lead to wasted materials. It can also lead to expensive overtime and a growing pile of unusable scrap.
Let’s break down some of the most common pitfalls in sheet metal cutting, and how SECANT software can help you steer clear of them.
- High Rates of Scrap and Waste
One of the biggest headaches for many sheet metal fabricators is the sheer volume of scrap generated by a poorly planned cutting process.
Often, offcuts are stored haphazardly, in unsuitable sizes, or even discarded outright. This can lead to fresh material being ordered unnecessarily. In a world where the prices of steel, aluminium and other metals keep rising, this is a direct hit to your bottom line.
SECANT tackles this problem head on. Our high-yield optimisation produces low-wastage cutting patterns, while our intelligent offcut management ensures offcuts are saved in the best possible dimensions for future jobs.
Rather than ending up with a jumble of awkward leftovers, SECANT helps you build a stock of reusable offcuts. Your team can easily reuse what you have before ordering more.
Over time, that adds up to serious cost savings and a cleaner, leaner workshop.
- Inaccurate Quotations
Speedy, accurate quotes are vital to winning business in the competitive sheet metal fabrication market. However, many workshops still rely on manual calculations or outdated software. This leads to two risks: quoting too low and losing money on the job, or quoting too high and losing the client altogether.
With SECANT you can make precise calculations of costs based on actual cutting patterns and material yields. You can quickly see how much material is genuinely needed, how much scrap is expected, and how much time the machine will run. The result? Quotes that are both competitive and profitable.
- Underutilising Your Machines
It’s common for smaller fabrication businesses to invest in good machinery but not make use of its full potential.
Manual cutting plans often produce simple, convenient layouts that don’t make the most of the saw’s capacity or cutting speed. This means machines spend more time idle or running at sub-optimal performance. Meanwhile, your staff hang around waiting.
By automatically generating optimised cutting plans, SECANT ensures your saws run at their full potential.
- Human Mistakes in Data Entry
Manual data entry on the production floor is another common trap. Transcribing a parts list, entering measurements, and noting details of a job can easily lead to mistakes. Such mistakes affect cutting, assembly and delivery.
A single misplaced decimal can ruin a full batch, wasting sheet metal, driving up overtime, and creating customer complaints.
SECANT addresses this risk with smart data transfer. Parts lists can be imported directly from Excel or CSV files, and cutting patterns can be sent straight to your saws with no manual re-keying. This not only saves time but eliminates transcription errors, keeping your operations tight and accurate.
- Difficulty Managing Complex Cutting Jobs
Nowadays, fabrication often demands more than a simple one-off cut: you may need to mix different materials, cut to tight tolerances, or handle tricky materials.
For small joinery firms or furniture workshops that also process wood or plastics alongside sheet metal, planning such jobs by hand is hard work and often leads to material mismatch or wasted panels.
SECANT Sheet software, designed for smaller workshops with panel or sliding table saws, simplifies this. Whether you’re working on aluminium, timber, or MDF, SECANT Sheet makes it easy to produce clean, efficient, and consistent results.
- Losing Track of Your Offcuts
Many workshops have a scrap bin brimming with offcuts that might one day be used. However, in practice, they usually get forgotten.
Managing stock offcuts in a reliable, accessible way is an ongoing challenge. That’s especially painful in sheet metal fabrication, where raw materials are costly.
SECANT’s intelligent offcut tracking changes the game. Every offcut is catalogued with its dimensions and suitability for future jobs, giving your team confidence to pull from existing stock before cutting into fresh material. This future-proofs your inventory strategy, protects you from price fluctuations, and helps you move towards more sustainable production.
- An Inefficient Production Process
Finally, there’s the production floor itself. You don’t want staff wasting time sorting through parts, hunting for matching pieces or correcting mistakes.
SECANT’s automatically generated, fully documented cutting patterns make life much easier.
Your production staff will benefit from consistent, easy-to-read reports with exact part locations and cutting sequences. Work in progress can be controlled far more effectively, helping you schedule staff and time on machines with confidence.
Find out more about our software for sheet metal fabrication. Or simply contact our team for more information.