FlowVisual — press kit
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Version 1.2.1, released 8 September 2026. Current material: https://flowvisual.app/en/press

One sentence · 25 words
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FlowVisual is a desktop process simulator for macOS and Windows: it runs a business process, names the constraint, and prices a planned change in money and time.

Short · 60 words
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FlowVisual is a process simulator for macOS and Windows. Instead of drawing a flowchart, it runs the process: work flows through the model, load lands on the roles and systems that carry it, and a Monte Carlo stress test over thousands of working days names the constraint. Every planned change is re-simulated end to end and reported as Before/After in money and time — as a range, never as one flattering figure. It all runs locally, with no account and no cloud.

Long · 150 words
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FlowVisual is a process simulator for the desks of consultants, lean leads and operations managers — macOS and Windows, built by Balane GmbH in Munich. A diagram shows the order of the steps; it cannot tell you which role runs out of hours first, what the third handover costs over a year, or whether a recommendation still holds in a bad week. FlowVisual answers that, because it runs the process: durations go in as ranges (“8 to 20 minutes”), a Monte Carlo stress test takes the model through thousands of days and reports cycle time as P50 and P90, throughput, and the odds of breaching the promise. For every change it re-simulates the whole model rather than adding up savings — which is how you see that improving the wrong step buys nothing and only moves the constraint along. What leaves the building is a proposal PDF on your own letterhead, with an assumptions register and a P10–P90 band. Modelling and simulating are free for good.

About Balane GmbH
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Balane GmbH is a software company in Munich. It builds tools for process work — FlowVisual for the simulation, flowrefy.com for the method behind it. Managing director is Jonas David Höttler. The products are sold direct, with no investors behind them.

How to write it
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“FlowVisual” — one word, capital F, capital V, no space, not all caps. The company is “Balane GmbH”, not “Balane” alone where it matters legally. The method next door is called “FLOW” and belongs to flowrefy.com — it is not the product.

Facts
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Product: FlowVisual 1.2.1
Publisher: Balane GmbH, Balanstraße 84, 81541 Munich, Germany — HRB 301320, Munich Local Court
Category: Desktop business process simulation
Platforms: macOS 13 or newer (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10/11 64-bit
Where to get it: Mac App Store, Microsoft Store, and signed installers straight from the release repository
Price: Modelling, the stress test, all four lenses, Before/After, presentation mode and the PDFs are free for good. Pro adds your own letterhead, the Word and draw.io exports, and the shared project folder.
Languages: Nine: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified). Currency switches separately.
Engine: Discrete-event simulation with Monte Carlo repetition. Results as P50 and P90, deltas as a P10–P90 band.
Lenses: Four readings of one model: Model, Operations, IT and Management — not four documents to keep in sync.
Import: Reads draw.io drawings and turns them into a model you can run — free, because nobody starts a project by redrawing forty boxes.
Export: PDF (proposal, documentation, change memo), Word, draw.io, SVG, JSON, CSV.
Privacy: No account, no cloud, no telemetry. The application makes exactly one network request: the licence check when a key is activated.
Technology: Flutter/Dart, one codebase for macOS and Windows. Files are plain text and live in the engagement folder or in version control.
Released: Version 1.2.1 on 8 September 2026

Prices in euro, consumer prices including VAT, billed annually. One licence key covers Windows and macOS at the same time.

The loop — six steps, in this order
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01  Capture: Steps, decisions, drop-offs, sub-processes. Per step: who does it, which system, how long — as a range, not a figure.
02  Stress test: 400 runs. Each run is a working day with its own case volume and its own service times.
03  Constraint: The step that binds — with load on an average day and on a busy day, and beside it the curve showing at what volume it tips.
04  Options: Proposed variants, each re-simulated in full and ranked by effect. Nothing is added up.
05  Prove: The basis of every figure, a register of all assumptions, a plausibility check against your own recommendation.
06  Export: Proposal, process documentation, raw data — on your own letterhead.

What the engine does
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Arrivals
The day's volume is drawn, not set: a lognormal around the stated figure, steered by variability, peak chance and peak factor. The same variability also enters the queue term as arrival variance.

Service
“8 to 20 minutes” is read as the P10–P90 of a lognormal. That way the occasional monster case beyond the upper bound can occur — a uniform draw between 8 and 20 could never produce it, and it is the one that ruins the day.

Queueing
Waiting follows Kingman (G/G/1): the factor (arrival plus service variance)/2 times utilisation/(1−utilisation). Near the capacity line the term is linearised and above it driven into saturation — beyond that line a queue has no steady state left to compute.

Routing
How often a step is visited per case is solved as a fixed point rather than by a topological sort. That is the only way rework counts: a “send it back for correction” loop disappears in a sort, and half the step's load with it. Cycles are found by Tarjan's algorithm; parallel branches that re-converge count the case once, not twice.

Shared resources and sub-processes
Several steps can compute against one team, one system or one licence pool. When the pool is short, the individual step is only the symptom — the finding names the pool. Sub-processes roll their capacity and service time up into the parent step, which is why an edit three levels down moves the headline figure.

What comes out
Cycle time as P50 and P90, throughput, the share of days over capacity, cost per day as a P10–P90 band — plus the average of the worst five percent of days, and flow efficiency: hands-on work divided by lead time. In real processes that tends to sit in the single digits, and it is the most uncomfortable number in the whole analysis.

Fragility
The same run again at 0.8 · 0.9 · 1.0 · 1.1 · 1.2 · 1.35 · 1.5 times today's volume. What is measured is not the level but the curvature: harm grows faster than load, which is how a step that is green today can be the first to go non-linear in a busy week.

Gaps stay gaps
A step nobody stated a capacity for cannot win the constraint ranking — and is not painted as slack either. If not one step states anything, the result reads “constraint undetermined” rather than an invented figure.

The thresholds live in the source, not in a brochure: 85 % utilisation is the knee past which waiting inflates sharply; from ten percent of days over capacity the verdict reads “strained”. And the randomness has a fixed seed — the same model gives the same figure when you open it again. A proposal whose result changes when you recompute it would be no proposal at all.

Where to get it
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Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762723631
Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p7rdkc5dw4x
Signed installers (no store account): https://github.com/JHBalane/Balane-Releases/releases/tag/flowvisual-v1.2.1

Quotes
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„A process diagram is a claim. The moment you run it, it becomes checkable — and in most workshops the result surprises the person who drew the diagram first.“
— Jonas David Höttler, Managing Director, Balane GmbH

„The sentence the whole application hangs on: nobody should ever have to guess where a change takes effect. That is why we never add savings together but re-simulate the whole model for each variant. It is the only way to see that the second measure buys nothing because the first already moved the constraint.“
— Jonas David Höttler, Managing Director, Balane GmbH

„We never report a single number. A saving without a range is the first thing a sceptical room takes apart — and rightly so.“
— Jonas David Höttler, Managing Director, Balane GmbH

„The tool has to hold up in the room where the decision is made. That is why there is a presentation mode and no slide export: the question from the table gets answered on the running model, not deferred to the next meeting.“
— Jonas David Höttler, Managing Director, Balane GmbH

Terms of use
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• Free to use in editorial coverage of FlowVisual — no permission needed, no embargo.
• Credit: FlowVisual / Balane GmbH.
• Cropping is fine. Stretching, recolouring or swapping the labels is not.
• Leave the mark and the icon as they are; do not build them into a logo of your own.
• Not for advertising, packaging or product comparisons outside editorial coverage.

Contact: j@hoettler.com — subject line “Press” is enough.
