What Is Stock Cutting?

Stock cutting in simple terms

Every workshop starts with standard-sized stock: a 2440 × 1220 mm plywood sheet, a 3210 × 2250 mm float glass pane, or a coil of sheet metal. A project, however, calls for many smaller parts in different sizes and quantities. Stock cutting is the step where you decide exactly how to slice the large stock so all the required parts come out of as few sheets as possible.

The challenge is that there are countless ways to arrange parts on a sheet. Some arrangements leave large unusable offcuts; others pack parts tightly and leave only thin trim. The goal of good stock cutting is to find the arrangement that uses the fewest sheets and produces the least scrap.

The cutting stock problem

In operations research, this is known as the "cutting stock problem" — a classic optimization challenge first formulated by the mathematician Leonid Kantorovich in 1939 and made practical for computers by Gilmore and Gomory in the 1960s. It is NP-hard and belongs to the same family as bin packing: fit a set of items into the fewest containers.

Because the number of possible layouts grows explosively with the number of parts, solving it by hand is impractical for anything but the smallest jobs. This is why cutting optimization software exists: it evaluates thousands of arrangements in seconds and returns a near-optimal layout.

Why stock cutting matters

• Material savings: Tighter layouts mean fewer sheets purchased and less money spent.
• Less waste: Reducing offcuts lowers disposal costs and environmental impact.
• Faster production: A clear cutting plan reduces setup time and cutting errors.
• Predictable quoting: Knowing exact sheet counts lets you quote jobs accurately.

Manual vs. optimized stock cutting

Experienced cutters can lay out simple jobs efficiently by eye, but as part counts grow, manual layouts leave money on the table. An optimizer accounts for blade thickness (kerf), grain direction, rotation, and trim allowance simultaneously — variables that are hard to juggle in your head.

A tool like CutList Machine takes your part list, applies these constraints, and produces a visual cutting diagram plus a printable report, so the person at the saw simply follows the plan.