I built Flowcell because the spreadsheet could not show the line.

I built Flowcell after spending two full days in a meeting room trying to design a new assembly line.

There were consultants, managers, and engineers in the room. We were debating one line versus two, three workstations versus four, whether to add buffers between stations, and whether workers could flex between workstations instead of being fixed in one place.

The consultants introduced an idea that made sense in theory: more workstations than people, with workers moving between stations so they would not be waiting around. But it was hard to picture. Would the walking time hurt productivity? Would the line stay balanced? Would a mixed-model product mix break the plan as soon as we put it on the floor?

We had an Excel model. It was useful, but only up to a point. It told us how long the processes took and roughly how many people we needed. What it did not show was how the work would actually split across the stations, how products would flow, or whether the future-state line would behave the way we hoped.

So I went home and built a rough simulator.

The first version let us enter processes, connect them to products, set up workstations, change the number of people, and run the line. It was not polished, but it made the idea visible. The next day, I showed the team and consultants how their proposal could work for our mixed-model line.

That was the moment Flowcell became more than a one-off internal tool.

It helped us get the line design right first time. It saved time, reduced debate, and gave people more confidence before we changed the real factory floor.

Flowcell is built from that experience. It is for people who need a practical way to test line-design ideas quickly: lean consultants, engineers, improvement teams, and smaller manufacturers moving from batch production toward one-piece flow.

It is not designed to be a giant enterprise simulation package. It is intentionally fast, simple, and visual. The data going in will never be perfect, and the simulation will never be a crystal ball. But it can show which idea is worth trying first, which constraint is likely to matter, and whether a future-state line deserves confidence before people start moving benches, tools, and operators.