AI and Automation, built around your operation.
Argus works alongside industrial teams to identify where process friction is costing the most time, then designs and builds custom tools, applying AI where it genuinely fits, that integrate with the systems already in place. The capability is new. The way your business runs is not.
where we start
Every engagement begins with a three-day audit.
- 01
Map the current state
Three days on site with your estimator, supervisor and office staff, following one work order from quote to invoice while recording every step it takes, every system it touches and every figure that gets entered twice.
- 02
Build on your live data
We build inside the systems you already run, working with your actual quotes, jobs and invoices rather than sample data. The people who will use it are testing it on live work inside the first week, and we change it based on what they tell us before it goes into daily use.
- 03
We train your people to run it
We sit with every person who will use the tool at their own station and work through live jobs with them until they can run it without us standing there. We leave a written runbook that covers each step and the problems that come up most often, so a new hire can pick it up later without starting over.
- 04
Support and coverage
We maintain the tools after handover, so when your ERP updates, a supplier changes a form, or the process shifts to take on new work, the system gets adjusted instead of quietly breaking. You deal with the same people who built it, which means no ticket queue and no explaining your operation to somebody new every time something goes wrong.
Who it's for
Built for oil field services, fabricators, and machine shops.
Oil field services & rental
Rental and service companies managing equipment fleets, dispatch, field tickets, and billing across multiple sites, where the gap between what happened in the field and what shows up on the invoice is where margin disappears.
Fabricators
Shops quoting, nesting, and scheduling against tight windows, where material tracking, drawing revisions, and shop-floor status reporting decide whether the next job lands on time.
Machine shops
Precision machining operations where job quoting, work order routing, and quality documentation move through manual handoffs, and a single missed revision can tie up a machine for half a day.
Who's behind it
The people who walk your floor are the people who write the code.
Before this, we spent our careers with the largest oil sands operators in Canada, working in supply chain, materials management, operations and maintenance, and change management. That work meant running the same processes we now automate: getting orders issued and received, keeping material moving, planning maintenance work, and writing the procedures crews had to follow. When we walk through a shop, we are not learning how this industry runs. We already know what these processes look like when they work well, so we can go straight to the places where yours is losing time.
We've worked with some of the largest oil sands producers, and that experience shapes what we bring to smaller operations: the same approaches the majors use to move information without retyping it, sized to fit a shop's systems and budget rather than an enterprise platform. Because the people doing the audit are the people writing the code, nothing gets lost between what we saw on your floor and what gets built. There is no spec handed to a developer who has never seen your operation, and when something needs adjusting later, you are talking to the person who built it.
The part of this work that fails most often is not the software. It is adoption. A tool only pays for itself if the crew actually uses it, and we have led that side professionally: rolling out new processes inside operating facilities, training the people affected, and staying with it until the new way of working held.
We started Argus because of a pattern we watched through our entire careers: the administrative load on industrial businesses keeps growing, and it never goes the other way. Every new customer requirement, compliance form and reporting request adds a little more typing to somebody's day, and no requirement ever gets removed. It builds quietly until the estimator spends more of his week moving numbers between systems than pricing work, and the office adds headcount while the shop stays the same size. The arithmetic is what makes it worth fixing: one hour of paperwork a day, per person, is six working weeks a year, paid at full wages, producing nothing a customer would pay for. When a workflow is set up so routine information moves on its own, those hours come back, invoices go out sooner, and payroll goes toward the work that earns the revenue.
FAQ
The questions we get before day one.
The audit is a fixed fee, set to cover our costs for the three days and nothing beyond that. You know the price before we arrive, and there is no meter running. We spend those days at the shop or site with each team that touches the process, the office, the floor and dispatch, shadowing the actual workday rather than asking people to describe it in a boardroom, because the difference between how a process is described and how it actually runs is usually where the time is going. By the end we understand how work moves through the business, from the first call to the final invoice, and we propose nothing until we do.
For most shops that is Microsoft 365: Outlook, Excel, Teams and SharePoint, alongside an ERP such as SAP, Dynamics or Sage. Our first move is always inside what you already pay for. The Microsoft licence most businesses carry includes automation tools most businesses have never switched on, and a good share of what we build lives entirely inside that subscription, in the same screens your people already work in every day.
Where a job needs more than that, we build small, purpose made tools that connect to your existing systems directly. Most modern software, including the major ERPs, is built to exchange information with other programs through connections the vendor already provides. We use those connections so a signed ticket, a timesheet or a completed work order moves from one system to the next on its own, instead of being retyped at every desk it passes. Each tool does one job, runs alongside the process you already have, and changes nothing about how the rest of the business operates. Where AI earns a place in the work, it runs inside that same environment, so your information stays where it already lives.
You get the build, the documentation, and the measurement read, and you own all three. From there you either run it yourself, bring us back for a scoped rollout, or stop. There is no automatic renewal.
Yes, but lightly. IT approves access and reviews where data sits, usually inside a couple of short sessions. We work within your existing tenancy and security posture rather than around it.
Our work is concentrated in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia because site time matters. We will consider engagements elsewhere when the process can be mapped remotely.
Bring one process you're tired of.
Twenty minutes is enough to tell you whether it is worth automating, and what the pilot would cost.