San Francisco & the Bay Area
Operations software for the Bay Area, on exactly your clock.
Elarion is a Vancouver practice that builds the systems businesses run on — ERP integrations, supply chain, dispatch, case management, CRM. We work Pacific Time, so the Bay Area is the one place in the United States where there is no time difference to manage at all.
We do the business analysis first: what the system actually has to do, agreed in writing, before anyone prices a build. Most software projects fail before a line of code is written.
Who this is for, and who it is not
Worth settling in the first thirty seconds rather than the third meeting.
- Not us
- A venture-backed product company looking for engineers to ship features faster. That is a different trade with different economics, the Bay Area has the best of them, and we would be a poor fourth choice. If that is the ask, we will say so on the first call.
- Us
- An organisation that runs an operation — goods moving, vehicles and crews moving, matters progressing, product being made — where the software is an ERP bought years ago plus a decade of spreadsheets, and nobody has written down what the system actually has to do.
- Why the distinction matters
- Product engineering optimises for shipping and iteration. Operations software optimises for being correct about how the business already works, because the cost of getting a payroll run, an inventory count or a compliance record wrong is not a sprint, it is an audit. The method is different, and so is who you should hire.
What Bay Area organisations come to us for
Six kinds of work, each with a page that goes further.
Transit and public agencies
The Bay Area runs several transit authorities and regional agencies. Platform upgrades, payroll and reporting migrations, fleet and asset maintenance, work orders and paratransit scheduling are the work our lead analyst did inside Canadian transit authorities.
Ports, distribution and logistics
Container volume, warehousing and freight across the Bay. Orders, inventory, picking, dispatch, proof of delivery and the invoice at the end — connected, so nothing is keyed twice between the yard and the office.
Food, beverage and production
From the valley and the wine country: production scheduling, lot and batch tracking, yield, inventory and the reporting that has to reconcile with what actually shipped. Usually a custom application integrated with the ERP rather than a replacement for it.
Law firms and regulated practices
San Francisco is a major legal market. Case and matter management, document workflows and AI that answers from your own sources, with audit trails, retention rules and access control designed in rather than retrofitted.
CRM and ERP work
A custom CRM where how you win and serve clients is what sets you apart, or Salesforce, HubSpot and Dynamics 365 configured around a written specification. On the ERP side: integrations, reporting and the automation that grows up around it.
A build in trouble
A vendor that did not deliver, an inherited codebase, a project past its date and over its budget. A fixed-fee code audit and assessment comes first; the options and the decision come after.
California privacy law, designed in
California has the most developed privacy regime in the United States, and the part most vendors skip is the part that describes the vendor.
CCPA and CPRA rights
California residents can know what you hold, have it corrected or deleted, take it elsewhere, opt out of sale and sharing, and limit how sensitive personal information is used. In a system, each of those is a feature someone has to build: a lookup, an export, a deletion path that does not break referential integrity, and a record that it happened.
The terms we sign
California prescribes what has to be in your contract with a service provider or contractor — purpose limits, no secondary use, onward-transfer terms and assistance with consumer requests. We are that service provider, so those clauses describe us. We expect to sign them, and we would rather discuss them at the specification stage than at signature.
Signals and assessments
Opt-out preference signals have to be honoured, not just a link in the footer, and higher-risk processing calls for a documented assessment. Both are far cheaper designed in than retrofitted, and California has a dedicated privacy regulator that can ask to see the work.
Our guide to privacy by design covers the design patterns; the obligations differ by jurisdiction. Not legal advice: confirm the position with your privacy officer or counsel.
Why a Canadian firm for a Bay Area build
- No time difference at all
- We work Pacific Time, same as you. Not an hour, not nine — none. Your whole working day is our whole working day, which for requirements work is the entire game: every project is a long sequence of small clarifications, and an offshore offset turns each of them into a day.
- A short flight when it earns it
- About two and a quarter hours direct from Vancouver. For an engagement whose requirements live in a physical operation we come and watch the work done; for a code audit or a well-defined change we do not charge you for travel that adds nothing.
- Ordinary contracting
- A Canadian operating entity under USMCA, contracting in English under common law, invoicing in US dollars, at a fixed price against a written specification. Your counsel will have seen the shape before.
- The analyst is who answers
- Not an account manager and not a junior sent to take notes. The person who writes your specification leads the engineers who build it and stays accountable until it ships.
Straight about the local part
- What we do not claim
- No San Francisco office, no California address, and no organisation in our career history is Californian. We are a Vancouver practice that works for US clients.
- And not this either
- We are not going to out-rank the directories for "software development company San Francisco", and we are not trying to. If you found this page, it was probably for something narrower, and that is the kind of work we want.
- What does transfer
- A decade of business analysis in asset-intensive and regulated operations — transit, forestry and manufacturing, provincial distribution, a pension corporation, a health authority and a university. Those operations are not Canadian in any way that matters to the software.
- Where to start
- A free call, then a fixed-fee piece of analysis small enough that you can judge us on it before anything larger is committed. The same first step we offer at home.
Questions Bay Area buyers ask
- Do you have an office in San Francisco?
- No. Elarion is based in downtown Vancouver, Canada, and works with US clients remotely, travelling when the work needs it. If your requirement is a supplier with a Bay Area address, we are not it, and we will say so on the first call rather than three weeks in.
- Do you cover Silicon Valley and the South Bay?
- Yes — this page covers the Bay Area, including Oakland, the Peninsula and San Jose. We have not written a separate Silicon Valley page because Silicon Valley is a nickname for a region rather than a city, and a page per nickname would be padding rather than information.
- What is the time difference?
- None. We work Pacific Time, the same as you, so there is no handoff window and no overnight wait for an answer.
- Will you sign our CCPA service-provider agreement?
- Yes, and we would rather read it early than at signature. California prescribes specific terms for service providers and contractors — purpose limitation, no secondary use, onward transfers and help with consumer requests — and those obligations shape the system, not just the contract. We prefer to design to them from the specification onward.
- Where will our data be hosted?
- Wherever the specification says, and for US clients that is normally a US region. It is a written decision your counsel sees before anything is built, rather than whatever a platform defaulted to.
- We are a startup looking for engineers. Can you help?
- Probably not, and we would rather be straight about it. We are an analysis-led practice for operations software — ERP, supply chain, dispatch, case management, the systems a business runs on. If you need engineers to ship product features quickly, the Bay Area has far better options than a firm in Vancouver, and we will point you at the kind of shop you actually want.
- Do you know California regulations in our industry?
- We know how to design software against a regulatory requirement — collection limits, retention, audit trails, access control and the documentation a reviewer expects — and we have done it under Canadian privacy law and in public-sector governance. We do not hold ourselves out as experts in your specific California regulator, and we work from your compliance team’s requirements rather than guessing at them.
Where to start
Same time zone. Let’s talk today.
30 minutes, free. Bring the problem, or the specification you already have.