luthj
Engineer In Residence
When I sent parts to be CNC and supplied the materials there was large crops left over so I started to hand nest the parts doing a better job than the $10-$15k software that was used.
Rule of thumb I use is biggest to smallest.
Some of the newer software lets you load a previous job, to mas off the used area of a sheet. But for irregular jobs doing it by hand helps a lot. For lower precision stuff, the software will join common lines together to reduce cutting time as well.