This paper discusses an application of mathematical programming techniques in the paper industry in determining optimal parent roll widths. Parent rolls are made from the reels produced at wide paper machines by slitting them to more manageable widths. The problem is finding a set of the slitting patterns that will minimize the trim loss involved in the sheeting operation. Two programming models, one linear and one mixed integer linear, are presented in this paper. Also presented are the computational experience, the model sensitivity, and the comparison of the optimal solutions with the simulated operational data.