Keeping track of routed stuff

[Chriswagner92]

Good evening everyone,

as a producer of several sets of channel letters a month/week, we often have at least 3 jobs ganged up on a single sheet of material to help eliminate waste product. A problem we are encountering, between the computer layout and building process, we have lost a couple letters here and there, and as a result, had to recut and use more product. My question to the world is this: how do you organize your jobs so that no letters are "lost" between nesting them on the sheet to install? We have been doing piles in the shop, and I started color coding all the letters by job, but even that doesn't seem to be enough.

 

[Z SIGNS]

Most of these problems are human error AKA incompetency.

You got to double and triple check everything before you click that run button.

I have found trying to nest jobs to save material costs is not worth it.
I believe it cost me more in time and confusion.

Unless you are doing thousands of the same thing trying to nest to increase profit is futile.

So what's the real reason trying to keep track of nesting ?

 

[Chriswagner92]

Most of these problems are human error AKA incompetency.

You got to double and triple check everything before you click that run button.

I have found trying to nest jobs to save material costs is not worth it.
I believe it cost me more in time and confusion.

Unless you are doing thousands of the same thing trying to nest to increase profit is futile.

So what's the real reason trying to keep track of nesting ?

I like to think, even if it may be flawed logic, that by using less material, we not only get scrap that we can use, but it is also less time for whoever is running the router to be switching out sheets and therefore, be more productive. And yes, I do understand its human error 99% of the time, i was just wondering if there was a workflow from computer, to drive, to router, to finished pieces to get things more organized. Right now this is our process:
1- wireframes drawn, patterns laid out, mounting holes added to letters, save as dxf for cad.
2 after toolpaths are drawn out in bobcad, save as Blank.nc, then copy file to flash drive. Files that were edited and originals get saved in its own folder by Drive>customer>job>DXF, BC, NC. NC files are then copied to flash drive and brought out to router table.
3- files are copied from flashdrive to router computer to be cut.
4-after they are cut, i transfer the completed jobs to a completed folder within the drive, and whoever is running the router, deletes the files from the computer.

It seems like a lot, and when jobs change, or we need to recut something we need to shift everything around, and sometimes files get mixed up.

 

[ExecuPrintGS]

I don't know anything about channel letters or nesting cnc jobs but what I would do is name each piece associated with each job.

So Job "a" would have pieces a1;a2;a3 etc etc which would correspond to a drawing showing all the components.

Once pieces are all routed and before removing them from the table you can mark them or slap a label on them (depending on if the top will be exposed) with the item number, then all pieces from job "a" would be set aside, and all pieces from job "b" would go somewhere else.

Drawing attached because that description probably doesn't make sense.

You may already be doing this but that would be my approach.

(there are a few letters missing from Billy's sign :ROFLMAO

This is exactly what ive done for our production staff. I make a printout and before they remove the items they mark them and double check.

 

[Chriswagner92]

I give them a proof what the completed job looks like, a printout of how the letters are arranged on the sheet, and a description of what needs to be done with it like bit size etc