Pulseoniq? Sounds like a fitness tracker.

“Are you kidding me, dad.”

Moritz did not put his fork down. My youngest has a way of judging things as though he were mentioning the weather.

Niklas took a little longer, which I mistook for diplomacy of my elder son. “Pulseoniq sounds like a half-baked brand attempt of a low level fitness tracker.”

My wife Nicole smiled. The smile that means she has already decided not to rescue me. “Honey, either more work for you and Elmar. Or tell us more and surprise us.”

Elmar and I had settled on the name Pulseoniq for our new company the morning of that same day. It came out of a brainstorm between the two of us, and it was one of the candidates whose domains were all still free. We were super pleased with ourselves, and could clearly see “the next Karlowitsch thing” to be called Pulseoniq.

So, I made the “Karlowitsch stress test” the same day at dinner with my family. Well, the pleasure lasted about nine seconds.

I took a deep breath, and accepted the challenge my wife just gave me. I started talking with the intent to surprise …

What we are actually after: flow

Let us start with what we care about, because the name follows from it and not the other way round. Honestly: we had the idea (aka content) first. Then we had to find a name for “the thing”.

Everything we are building is about flow on the shopfloor. Not a better plan. Not a fuller order book. Not a better forecast. Not better MRP. Our (founding) idea is to help make-to-order manufacturers achieve flow. In that regard, flow means work moving through the shop at an even, healthy rate.

When flow is steady, the good numbers arrive on their own. On-time delivery improves because nothing sits in a queue that nobody is watching. Utilization improves because the bottleneck moves less often and less violently. Just to name two examples.

When it is not steady, it usually looks like this: an order stalls at a machine on Tuesday morning. Nobody notices until Thursday, when the weekly review turns it up. By then two days of capacity have been spent on the wrong sequence, and the conversation is no longer about production, it is about what to tell the customer.

Ask a production manager what a good week felt like and they will not describe a KPI. They will describe a chaos-free week in which they were “in control” and nothing went unplanned.

Flow is the outcome. The numbers are how you notice it afterwards.

It is also why we are not building another scheduling tool. A schedule is a statement about the future, made at the moment you know least. Flow is a property of the present, and the present is where the surprises live.

Why then pulse?

Once you think of flow as something with a rhythm, the medical picture is almost unavoidable.

Nobody wants a spectacular pulse. You want a steady one. A doctor takes your pulse not to find an impressive number but to hear whether the rhythm is regular, and learns more from an irregular pulse at 70 than from a steady one at 85.

A shopfloor works the same way. How many orders you finished last week tells you less than whether the work moved evenly or in lurches. Two shops can post identical output and be in entirely different health.

Having said this, my son’s ironic comment about the fitness tracker was somewhat to the point. Our first product will be a kind of fitness tracker for manufacturing running on Business Central. We call it Shopfloor Pulse Check.

Back to the analogy. The pulse check is a one-time thing. However, a sound and controlled pulse is nothing that comes from just checking. It comes from taking actions and living for a healthy pulse. The same is true for the shopfloor’s flow.

If we would just go for the diagnosis, we would fall short. Hence, we will help manufacturers measure their shop’s pulse … and then we will add more tools to help them intelligently control the flow.

We call this real-time execution intelligence and control. It is meant to help our clients achieve shopfloor flow - and we take their pulse to achieve this.

So far to the “pulse” in the name. Now, let’s look at the “oniq”.

Why “oniq” and not something cleaner?

Say it out loud. It is meant to sound like “-onic”.

The second part of our new name (Pulseoniq) sounds like the second part of our old name (NETRONIC). This is no accident. It is full intent. And here is why:

For far more than a decade, Elmar and I ran NETRONIC Software. As such, we built manufacturing software both for Business Central and for high-mix low-volume manufacturers that were too small to operate an ERP system. With all modesty: If you sell Dynamics 365 Business Central to manufacturing clients, there is a fair chance you have carried one of our products, or at least came across some content we created.

We are not distancing ourselves from that. The opposite is true.

Everything we know about what actually happens on a make-to-order shopfloor we learned there. In our time at NETRONIC, we learned why the schedule stops being true by Tuesday morning, why the data is messy for most SMB manufacturers and always will be, and what a production manager really does with a screen in front of them.

We are proud of that legacy, and the experience gained is a solid leg that we stand on.

Hence, the syllable “oniq” is a deliberate nod. It is our tribute to where we come from.

Why then “iq” at the end of Pulseoniq?

As proud as we are of that legacy, one aspect comes in stronger. Change is chance. And changing from “ic” to “iq” allowed us to make that “iq” wordplay about intelligence.

You find this cheap? Well: guilty!

When we discussed intelligence wordplay options, we decided for IQ and against something “AI-ish”. Why? Honestly: I am not sure. But maybe we wanted to put “intelligence” into the foreground and not “artificial” ;-)

So, kidding aside. The intelligence bit is important to us, and we wanted it to carry in our name. Why? Three reasons:

First: What our products do. We aim at delivering real-time execution intelligence and control. And, we are building that from scratch and not with any product or company legacy that we have to consider. Hence, our software products are being built on AI from the ground up. The design principle is that our software learns what normal flow looks like on your customers’ shopfloors rather than on a generic one, and speaks up only when something has actually started to drift. They will enable your customers to achieve flow by making intelligent decisions when they are needed.

Second: How we build the products. We are founders with a super small team, and we love a bootstrapped approach. Nevertheless, we are building software for a market that normally takes a much larger company. That arithmetic only works because AI sits in the workflow everywhere: we started ramping up an “agentic development factory” and so far are speechless on how this seems to work, and how it changes the software development work as we have known it from before.

Third: How we run the company. The same holds for everything that is not product. Our positioning, our messaging, our market research, the brief this post was written from: all of it lives in a knowledge base we work on with AI every day. It is not a demo and it is not a gimmick. It is the reason a company this small can move at our current pace.

The “iq” is not a claim that we are clever (comment: I would never say this about myself ;-). It is a claim about how we work.

Admitted: Niklas was right

A name that needs a blog post to explain it is, on the face of it, a bad name. Niklas was not being rude, he was being accurate: heard cold, with no context around it, “Pulseoniq” could be a wearable. We knew that when we chose it. We chose it anyway.

We chose it because the alternative was a name that explains itself instantly and means nothing in three years. Every category we could have named ourselves after is a category we are deliberately not in. A name that describes the shape of the thing rather than its current label leaves us room to be right about something that does not have a common word yet.

That is a bet, not an argument. We will know in a few years whether it paid off.

Back to the dinner table

Nicole’s was the fair response: tell us more and surprise us.

The telling is the easy half. Pulse, oniq, iq: flow, heritage, and intelligence compressed into ten letters, and I can get through it at a dinner table in about four minutes.

The surprising is the part still outstanding. A name is a claim, and ours is currently a claim about software still being built and shopfloors we have not yet measured. Ask me again when the first beta customers have run the check, and when the execution apps have caught something before a customer picked up the phone.

Moritz, for the record, still thinks it sounds like a fitness tracker. He may be right. But, he is also not the target market.