Build your own Helix

The live sandboxes show Helix running someone else’s operation. This page is the next step: your operation, set up from a sector template in a few minutes, kept as a working area on our demo server that you can start, stop and come back to.

Register

Open Register and set up your business and enter your email. We send a sign-in link — there is no password. The link works once and expires after a few minutes; ask for another any time.

Registering is the one place we ask for an email, and it is only used to keep your area and sign you in. It is not shared with anyone else.

Set up your business

Set up a business opens the setup form:

1. Sector — the template closest to yours: mobile trades (plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, heating engineers — booked visits to the customer’s address), delivery and collection (couriers and hauliers — a collection with a mandatory onward drop), or mobile vehicle services (tyre fitting, valeting, diagnostics — work done wherever the vehicle is). Each opens pre-filled with a complete example you can edit.
2. Business — your name, the marker icon, and where you are based (the centre and radius of the area your jobs and crews are generated in).
3. Products — what you sell. For each: how quickly you promise to attend, and one or more service options — a name, how long it takes, and the skill it needs. The skill is how Helix matches the right crew to the job, so every option names one.
4. Resources — the kinds of crew or vehicle that do the work: a name, an icon, the skills they carry, how fast they travel relative to the norm, and how many are on shift.

Every field becomes part of a real Helix domain file — the same configuration a full client runs, in the same shape — so what you get is not a mock-up but a Helix with your products, your crews and your skills. Nothing else is invented: the engine’s tuning parameters come from a proven baseline.

If something does not add up (a product needs a skill no resource carries, say) the form tells you exactly what, before anything is created.

Start it

Start builds your bundle, launches a private Helix on it and takes you in — usually well under a minute. Your email is pre-filled at the sign-in; that first sign-in makes you the administrator.

The default scenario loads on arrival: your crews on shift from your base, your kinds of job arriving around it, and Spiral planning the day at 10× speed. From there it is the same Helix as the live demo: dispatch, the contact centre, the engineer app, the Demo Runner and Self Config to build a different day.

Tune it

The landing page’s Tune panel opens your domain file. Change a service time, a lateness cost, an icon, an appointment window — every parameter is explained in the stop-params and resource-params references — and Apply restarts the optimiser on the new domain.

Every save is kept with your account. The next time you start the area, it starts from the domain you tuned, not from the template.

Stop, start, reset

An area stops itself when nobody is using it, and after four hours at most. Stopping is not losing: the world you entered — resources, jobs, the plan — is kept, and Start on your account page brings it back as you left it. Stop does the same on demand.

Reset world drops what you entered and seeds the default scenario again from your (tuned) setup. Edit setup reopens the form; saving regenerates the domain from it, and any tuning you made inside Helix is set aside on the server since it belonged to the previous setup.

What comes next

The area is the first step of a progression, each a status on the same account rather than a new start:

• A name — yourbusiness.honeywick.co.uk, when you want an address of your own.
• A hosted service — the same Helix as a production system: durable, not reaped, on our cloud hosting with persistence and a management service, for up to 20 resources on the basic licence.
• Customisation and integration — a client extension (your own screens, integrations and data), a repository of your own, and a Honeywick engagement to build it.

Talk to Honeywick when you are ready for any of them.