Overview
A corrugated plant buys paper in a few standard roll widths and sells boxes in every width its customers order. The gap between those two facts is where the money leaks: cut a 520mm sheet from a 2000mm roll three pieces across, and 440mm of every roll is thrown away as trim — more than a fifth of the paper, gone before a box is folded. Nama’s carton manufacturing software closes that gap by treating the cut as an optimisation problem and solving it, order by order and roll by roll.
A carton is a specification, not a line
Before anything is made, each box is described once as a carton specification: the finished length, width and height; the flat sheet size before folding; the paper grade in every layer — facing, fluting and liner; the fluting type, the pattern and the joining method; and the stages it passes through — corrugating, then printing and slotting, then finishing. Specifications nest: an assembled carton references the plain cartons it is built from, so ordering the assembly tells the system to make all its parts.
The order carries the manufacturing detail
A carton order is an ordinary sales document — customer, quantities, prices, delivery — with one difference. Each line names a specification, and behind it Nama writes the manufacturing detail the shop floor will actually build. An order, or part of one, is marked once it has been planned, so the same quantity is never planned twice by accident.
Planning is where the waste is decided
This is the core of the module. You open a material planning document, add one or more carton orders, and tell Nama what rolls are in stock — items, grades, widths, lengths and lot numbers — and your limits: the minimum trim you will accept, the shortest roll worth cutting, and how long the optimiser may run. Then it collects materials.
Behind that button is a constraint solver — Google OR-Tools’ CP-SAT engine, the same class of optimiser used in logistics and scheduling — searching millions of cutting plans for the one that wastes least. It returns which roll feeds each layer of each carton, how many pieces to cut across the width (strikes) and along the length (operations), the quantity planned per order, and the trim each plan leaves behind.
Companion orders are the part that pays for the module. Ask Nama to find them and it searches every unplanned order for boxes whose layers and grades are compatible with the batch in front of you, then ranks them by how little material the combination would waste. Accept one and it joins the plan; run the optimiser again, and you are cutting two customers’ boxes side by side from shared rolls.
From plan to floor
A finished plan generates production orders — each with a bill of material drawn straight from the cutting plan, the exact lots to issue, and the routing of operations — and material issues that withdraw those specific rolls from stock against the plan. Production execution then records what actually happened on the line, and trim can be captured as a co-product rather than silently lost, so the manufactured cost of a run reflects the paper it really consumed, not what it was estimated to.
What it assumes
The module is built for corrugated and folding-carton plants that cut sheeted product from roll stock. It leans on inventory for the roll lots it plans against and on production for the orders it generates; it does not schedule machines or sequence shifts. Every screen — specifications, orders, planning and issues — is documented in the Carton Manufacturing guide.
