Member tool

Laser Production Planner

The honest answer to "can I take this order" is arithmetic, and it is better to do it before you say yes.

Nothing is uploaded. It runs in your browser, so your files never leave your machine.

Part of the Maker Toolkit: fourteen tools that share one shop profile and one product list, so what you set up here is already known everywhere else.

Questions

Laser Production Planner — common questions

How do I know if a custom order will fit my week?

Total the machine hours from your own logged cut speeds, schedule them across the machines you own, and compare against the hours you can honestly work. The planner does that and reports the finish time, so the answer is a number rather than a feeling.

Does it account for more than one machine?

Yes. Machines run in parallel, so two lasers do not simply halve the time when one job is far longer than the rest. The schedule assigns work across your machines and reports the real finish time, including which machine is the bottleneck.

What if the batch does not fit?

You find out while you can still do something about it: quote a longer lead time, cut the order, or reorganise what runs first. That is the entire value of running it before you accept.

Next in the workflow

What most makers open after this

These are not a list of everything. They are the tools this one hands off to, and they already know what you did here.

Worth reading

The thinking behind this one

The tool does the arithmetic. These cover the decision it is serving.

Members

Laser Production Planner is part of the Hub

Ten of the fourteen tools are free and stay free — everything that gets a file onto the machine correctly. The four generators and the planner are what turn a craft into a product line, and they come with the Hub.

Join the Maker Growth Hub