Cutting Wizard

Planning a cut used to mean holding four things in your head at once: which fabrics this style uses, which of them are the main body and which are secondary, which markers cover which sizes, and how many plies of each to spread so every size comes out right.

The cutting wizard on the Production Order asks those four things in order, one screen at a time, and creates the whole cut plan at the end.

Getting there

Open a Production Order and go to the Cut Plan tab. It has four views — Plan, Board, Table, Calendar — and Plan is the wizard.

On an order where nothing has been cut yet, the tab opens on Plan by default, so a planner starts planning rather than staring at an empty board.

The three steps

A rail on the left tracks where you are. Steps you've already reached stay clickable, so going back to change a decision is one click, not a restart.

Step one — Fabric

Every material on the order is sorted into a type: Primary (the main body fabrics — every garment needs one cut of each) and Secondary (contrast panels, linings, anything that attaches to an existing primary cut).

GarmentFlow makes the first guess. Drag anything it got wrong into the right bucket. Each material carries a colour swatch taken from the real colourway, so a fabric is identifiable at a glance here, on the board, and in the table.

Getting this right matters more than it looks: primary fabrics create batches, secondary fabrics attach as Cutting Orders to batches that already exist. Mis-sort one and the cut plan builds the wrong shape.

Step two — Markers

Pick the Marker Orders you'll cut with. The table shows which sizes each marker covers; every required size needs at least one marker covering it, or it can't be cut.

Four ways to fill it in:

• Suggest best fit — sits at the top of each fabric type. GarmentFlow greedily picks the set of existing markers that covers the most sizes with the fewest markers. The fastest route on a style you've cut before.
• Reuse an existing marker — pick from the library on the right, grouped by type. It comes in with its real curve and its Marker Order id, so yields stay comparable across orders.
• Draft new — name a marker and define its ratio here; the Marker Order is created when the plan is committed.
• One per size — a marker per size, for uniform runs cut size by size.

The Needed / Covered columns keep score against the order's size curve. A size with no coverage is called out before you can move on.

Step three — Cut

For each colourway, set the plies for each marker. The wizard opens with a proposal already filled in — Auto-fill all recalculates it so a type's markers together cover every size — and each card shows pieces, lays and a live size check underneath: every size covered, or some sizes short — raise plies or press Auto-fill.

Secondary fabrics show a Lining note explaining what they will be cut onto.

Nothing exists yet. Everything on this screen is a proposal, and the footer says so.

Creating the plan

Create cut plan is the last click. It creates, in one pass:

• the Marker Orders you drafted,
• the Production Batches for each primary lay, and
• the Cutting Orders for every lay, including secondary cuts attached to the right primary batch.

If what the plan produces differs from what the order asked for, you're shown the variance and asked to acknowledge it before anything is written — a planner deliberately cutting 2% over is fine; a planner cutting 2% over by accident is not.

Re-running the wizard later on the same order adds to the plan rather than replacing it: work already cut is left alone.

The other three views

The wizard is one way to look at the cut. The Cut Plan tab's other views are the same data, differently shaped:

• Board — cards per variant and fabric, showing what's planned, what's pending and what's done. The day-to-day view once planning is over.
• Table — the cut matrix: sizes across, lays down, quantities in the cells. The view to check arithmetic in.
• Calendar — every Cutting Order by date, and where you schedule them.

Switching views never loses your place in the wizard.

What to do next

Schedule the cuts you just created in the Cut Calendar, or read Cutting Order for what happens on the table.