The job does not end at the last cut
In most workshops, when the saw stops the job is considered finished. Parts go to assembly and whatever is left leans against a wall. Weeks later nobody knows whether that 1,850 mm piece is still there, which profile it was, or whether it is worth looking for, so a new bar gets opened. The material was already bought, and it gets bought again.
Closing a job is the step that prevents this: reviewing the leftovers the plan predicted, measuring them for real, deciding which return to stock with a location, and discarding the rest. It takes two minutes per job and it is what turns an offcut into inventory instead of scrap by neglect.
Predicted and measured rarely match
The plan calculates each bar's leftover from the measurements, the kerf and the trim. The real bar can arrive slightly short, the operator may have cut off a damaged end, and a piece may have been repeated after a mistake. That is why closing does not take the predicted leftover as given: it proposes it and asks for the real measurement.
That gap is information, not an error. If measured leftovers are consistently shorter than predicted, either the configured trim is too small or the supplier's bars do not reach their nominal length. You find out by comparing, and you can only compare if somebody writes down what they measured.
- The measured length, not the calculated one.
- Where it is stored, so it can be found.
- Material and profile, which is what makes it reusable.
- And an explicit decision: back to stock, or not.
A remnant with no place is not a remnant
Keeping a leftover without noting where it is amounts to throwing it away with extra steps. The location does not need a warehouse system: "rack 3" or "next to the shear" is enough, as long as it is what people actually say when they talk about that spot.
You also need to decide when a piece stops being worth keeping. It depends on what each workshop cuts: in a shop making railings, half a metre is gold; in one making structural work, it is in the way. That threshold is the minimum remnant in the calculation, and setting it well is what makes the plan propose leftovers that will genuinely be used.
Comparing against what would have happened without a plan
At closing you choose a baseline: how many bars the same job would have taken without optimising. You can type it in — what the shop foreman knows would have been used — or keep the one the calculation estimates. The difference between that figure and the bars actually opened, multiplied by the catalogue price, is the job's saving.
It is worth saying what that number is and is not. It is not a promise or an industry average: it is a comparison against the reference the workshop itself wrote, using the prices the workshop itself entered. Its value lies in repeating it job after job: twelve closings say far more than one, and they tell you whether the plan is working or whether the trim, the kerf or the lengths being bought need review.
An ordinary closing
Bars opened 7 Baseline (manual) 9 Catalogue price 48.00 € / 6 m bar Difference 2 bars · 96.00 € Proposed remnants 3 Returned to stock 2 (1,850 mm and 940 mm) Discarded 1 (210 mm, below the minimum)
What Corte 1D does at this step
When a job is marked complete, Corte 1D proposes the leftovers bar by bar with the length it had calculated. Closing asks you to review all of them — it will not close halfway — accepts the real measurement and location of each, and stores the accepted ones as stock the next calculation can use.
In the same step you choose the baseline and the saving is computed and saved with catalogue prices. What remains is a closed version, with its sheet, its remnants and its comparison: the thing you can show three months later when somebody asks whether this was worth anything.