Material buys from the cut list, checked against stock and usable drops before your buyer orders.

Detailing issues the bill of materials as a report, a spreadsheet or a file for your production software: each piece mark with its shape, grade and cut length, each plate part with its thickness and size. Your buyer, or the PM who buys, works out how many bars of each size it takes, which pieces can come from stock or a drop, what to nest on which plate, and what to order from the service center or the mill, with the notes each line has to carry.

For the test, AI reads copies of those cut lists, with what was on your rack at the time, and drafts the purchase requests: stock length or plate size, quantity and grade, the pieces assigned to each bar or plate, the drop each would leave, and every cert or domestic-steel note copied from the job. Your buyer decides what gets ordered, and your shop decides how it gets cut.

Each shape comes in its own stock lengths. A Houston service center lists wide flange from 20 to 65 feet, typically in 5-foot steps. The Steel Tube Institute's April 2026 availability guide gives the common lengths for A500 tube as 20, 24, 40 and 48 feet, varying by size, wall and region, with longer lengths on direct mill orders. Chapel Steel stocks A36 plate up to 2 inches thick in 60, 96 and 120-inch widths and 240 or 480-inch lengths, and only 96-inch widths above that. Pieces laid end to end on 40-foot beams make a different buy than on 20s, so the draft uses the lengths and sizes your vendors actually sell, from your own price lists and past POs.

The grade on the cut list is the grade you buy. The STI guide says A500 runs on a regular rolling schedule and usually sits in distributor stock, while A1085, made like A500 but with tighter wall and corner tolerances and a Charpy requirement, is produced on demand, with longer lead times and minimum order quantities. A tube listed as A1085 can't come off a rack of A500 of the same size. Tekla PowerFab's combining settings include an option to allow grade substitutions; in this test it stays off. The draft buys exactly the grade and size the cut list names and sends any clash with stock to your buyer as a question.

Multing and nesting are where the buy gets decided. PowerFab's 2026 help calls the step combining: multing for linear items such as beams, nesting for plates. It assigns job items to inventory or to standard purchasable lengths in its pricing database, can favor the inventory that leaves the least scrap, can keep combining within one sequence of the job, and sorts the results into Combined, Not Combined and Exception before they are saved to a requisition or purchase order. Trimble's support article adds that when a vendor doesn't stock the lengths requested, pieces are uncombined and recombined to what the warehouse has, and the cut list changes with them. The draft shows its own bar and plate assignments so your reviewer can compare them with your buyer's, and the nest your shop cuts stays your shop's call.

Sheet parts bring limits of their own. On #4 brushed stainless the grain runs one way: Stainless Supply says it can run along a length up to 120 inches or across a width up to 48, and a piece longer than 48 inches can only have grain the long way. Turning a grained part to fit more on a sheet changes how the finished piece looks, so the draft keeps the grain direction the drawing calls for, sizes the sheet buy around it, and marks any part where it can't.

Some notes have to ride on the PO. On Pennsylvania public works, the Steel Products Procurement Act allows only steel products made from steel made in the United States, and it blocks payment for unidentified steel unless invoices, bills of lading, mill certification or similar records show the steel was melted and manufactured here. California's Buy Clean California Act asks for a facility-specific environmental product declaration, verified to ISO 14025, for hot-rolled sections, hollow structural sections and plate on state public works awarded since July 1, 2022; an industrywide or fabricator's declaration doesn't count. A requirement left off the PO is hard to recover at receiving, so the draft copies each one from the job's contract or specs onto every line it touches. Your reviewer, usually the buyer or the PM who orders steel, checks lengths, grades, drops used and every note against the POs that went out.

With a yes, each cut list detailing issues on your open jobs gets a draft buy list for about 30 days.

Your buyer checks every line, changes what needs changing and places the order; nothing reaches a vendor without that person. Nests, cut plans and grade questions stay with your shop, and the scoring table runs all month.