Intelligent Manufacturing involves the use of enabling sciences to augment the manufacturing process. Nesting is a process where optimization of available materials can lead to millions of dollars in savings when the cost of the substrate is high. The paper addresses key issues when optimising shape placement on expensive parent substrates such as carbon fibre or leather. The outcomes attained, method of part and plate representation, objective function definition, overlap calculation and optimization dependence of initial parts organization in the Simulated Annealing optimization process are presented.