Born in Nairobi · Built for workshops everywhere

The nest was never the whole job.

AnyCutlist began with an optimiser benchmark and an uncomfortable result: mature engines could reach the same yield while the workshop still lost hours, parts and margin everywhere around them. We built for that work.

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The question

We went looking for a better optimiser.

We set out to find the best optimiser for our customers' jobs. So we built a harness, ran identical cabinet jobs through three mature optimisation engines and repeated every scenario three times.

The material result came back a dead heat. The engines differed in speed and behaviour, but not in the number of sheets they used or the utilisation they reached.

That did not make optimisation unimportant. It made it infrastructure — something the workshop should receive already tuned, rather than the promise the whole product is sold around.

The benchmark that changed the product

Three mature optimisation engines. Identical jobs, three repetitions each.

JobPartsSheets usedUtilisation
Small21568.50%
Medium1351880.97%
Mixed3163184.39%
Large1,08013487.01%

Every engine returned the same sheet count and the same utilisation in every scenario. This is the recorded run that changed our roadmap, not a claim that every engine is identical in every respect.

What the nest cannot see

The expensive work lives outside it.

If material yield has converged and a workshop is still losing time or margin, the loss is somewhere the optimiser never looks. We kept finding the same four places.

Transcription

Someone retypes a hand-drawn list into a program after the shop has closed.

Slow quoting

The price goes out days later, while the customer keeps waiting and keeps shopping.

The wrong part

A note about edgebanding could be read two ways, and nobody stopped to ask.

Unpriced work

The extra groove, the hinge, the delivery. Done, delivered, never charged for.

So AnyCutlist starts before the optimiser

AnyCutlist keeps one reviewed version of the job intact from the way it first arrives to the price the customer receives. The optimiser is part of that chain, not the centre of the story. An optimiser prices a nest; a workshop sells a finished job.

See how the complete workflow fits together →

Our vantage point

Born in Nairobi. Useful wherever work arrives messy.

AnyCutlist is designed and built in Nairobi, Kenya. Here, a cutting list often arrives as a phone photo, supplier catalogues vary and one spoiled sheet lands directly on the owner's margin. That forced us to begin with intake, review and pricing instead of assuming perfect source data.

Those are not uniquely Kenyan problems. Most production software assumes the job is already structured; workshops everywhere know it often is not.

Local conditions shaped the product, but they do not limit its configuration. Each workshop sets its own currency, materials, service rates, terminology and downstream tools. Nairobi is the vantage point, not the boundary of the market.

Tell the Nairobi team what your market needs →

How we decide

What we hold to

Workshop reality over clean demos

We judge the product by the crooked phone photo, the shorthand in the margin and the service charge that is easy to forget — not by a perfect spreadsheet prepared for a demo.

Extraction is a draft, not an answer

Every part it produces goes in front of a person before a blade moves, measured against the usable sheet rather than the nominal one. Software that treats sign-off as friction was written by people who never had to pay for the board.

One job should stay one job

The list that was reviewed should be the list that is priced and sent forward. If somebody has to type the same parts again for the next tool, the system has broken the chain of trust.

Bring us your worst piece of paper

The pencil one, with the shorthand nobody outside the building could read. That is the job AnyCutlist was built to prove itself on.

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