Providing Accessible Labor Market Services: #1 Public Service Platform for Citizens and Business

P2H assisted client with an important mission—digitizing public services related to KSA’s labor sector. The government-initiated digital transformation of the human resources, employment, and social development sectors was gathering momentum. Our team was responsible for building a product that would make a difference in this process. Combining forces with our partner, we improved the provision of social services to all categories of citizens, expats, companies, and government agencies.

A robust, sustainable, and high-load platform geared toward government initiatives and public and business demands was central to our success. The platform became the country’s number one paperless solution, serving over 1.5 million users seeking access to hundreds of e-services.

Platform’s core

P2H was integral in adding new business logic and expanding the platform’s functionality. All these years, we worked hard to make the platform scalable, high-load, and secure, all while trying to find the best-fitting technological solutions. That’s what we delivered in terms of the platform’s core engineering.

• SSO. We developed a single sign-on (SSO) solution to provide users with a simple, secure way to sign in to all the platform’s services.
• Integration with state registers. To extract the required user information, we developed an API to integrate with government registries directly.
• User verification via Absher registry. Now that we ensured integration with state registers, we proceeded with the user verification mechanism to get the user’s digital identity through the Absher registry—the Ministry of Interior’s digital services portal.
• Multi-Tenancy. Building a multi-tenant system architecture, we allowed users to choose different companies to work for by moving around different workspaces.
• Role-based authorization. One user identity may be attached to several roles. For instance, an individual might perform a function of an owner, co-owner, or employee in three different companies. So, we added different roles to each tenancy to enable user and permissions management.
• Delegation. Working further with role-based authorization, we allowed business owners to grant certain authorities to individuals other than their employees.
• Subscriptions. Upon the client’s request, we added subscription functionality to the platform, as users must pay an annual fee to access and use it.
• Management of users and permissions. According to the system’s logic, a subscribed company owner with full role-based authority can grant their employees a limited-authority subscription.
• Notifications. We added notification functionality, including SMS, emails, and web notifications, to effectively exchange information.

As the platform’s functionality expanded, so did the users’ demand. Our engineering did re-factoring to prevent system malfunctioning, especially at peak loads:

• Implemented microservice architecture so each platform’s component has a single responsibility and can be independently deployed and scaled if a certain module needs to handle a heavier load.
• Added a global cache mechanism based on Elasticsearch, lowering pressure on the back end to enhance functionality and reduce operational burden.

As a result of refactoring, our client got a scaling-ready system that could gracefully manage any increases in load. The platform serves millions of users daily and perfectly handles several hundreds of them simultaneously.

Going further, we decided to make the approach to scalability even more rational and introduce system resource sizing. This lets us set aside a particular part of the system’s resources to ensure its proper functioning.

In addition, we started employing predictive analytics to expose the system’s vulnerabilities and prevent unwelcome episodes in system behavior. Heuristic analysis and machine learning algorithms will help our clients make data-based decisions.

E-services

The P2H team built a series of basic features for all categories of users: Establishments, Employees, and Government. For the first time in the history of Saudi labor relations, we helped our client transplant related services to digital space. This way, we contributed to the ambitious goals of reducing bureaucracy and adding transparency and convenience to business and social relations.

Here’s a round-up of some services we’ve been working on:

Labor Office

Digital transformation in labor and employment aims to make e-services accessible to all categories of citizens and expats. Even people with limited access to the Internet or digital devices shall not be an exception. To achieve this goal, we assisted our client with the technological implementation of Labor Office.

It’s a one-stop-shop service provided by labor relations agents in offices across provinces and major cities. The agent logs into the system on behalf of a particular citizen or expat, letting them access all the services available in their case.

Since the project started in 2019, eleven P2H teams have worked on a range of related tasks. We engaged more than 100 specialists to tackle challenges and achieve project goals.

The project got off to a good start, and we’re planning to roll out new features and enhance the user experience. In particular, the client, together with P2H, will digitalize more public services and improve platform accessibility for older users and people with disabilities. We also plan to introduce an advanced customer journey tracking tool. It will track how the system behaves when users interact with particular services. This way, we will get answers to many business questions and refine the services provided.

The same goes for Labor Office. This functionality will also be expanded and enhanced.

In addition, we plan to extend SSO to allow authorization for third-party apps using OAuth. The next step will be to extend the role-based user permission mechanism. As a result, the platform will become more flexible and make public services even more accessible to people and businesses.