Shear cutting, such as punching and trimming, of sheet metals is a widely used process in the automotive and heavy-duty vehicle industry due to low running costs and low cycle times. It's known that the edge properties obtained from this process has an impact both on formability and fatigue resistance of the formed part. The purpose of this contribution is to present a novel methodology for simulation of shear cutting processes taking a simplistic and phenomenological approach, resulting in an industry feasible simulation setup, simulation time and experimental workload. The task of simulating shear cutting processes includes high nonlinearities, large deformations, and crack propagation. A common approach is to use extensive material characterization to feed a material model including failure. Several specimen geometries are investigated to capture different stress states, resulting in a test and simulation matrix that could be overwhelming for industrial users. In this work it was investigated if a single tensile test and a punching test could be used for calibration of a material model including plastic flow and failure. Three different high strength materials were investigated using different cutting clearances and sheet thicknesses, one aluminium alloy and two complex phase steels. Characterization of the resulting cut edges were used for validation of the simulation results. It is shown that good agreement between simulation and experiments is achieved in terms of punch force and displacement. The main characteristics of the cut edge is also captured. Hence, using this simplified approach for simulation of shear cutting processes could reduce time to market and development cost for implementation of new materials by providing information about the process effects to a minimum of simulation and experimental effort.