Live across Canada's major airports in 8 weeks.

The customer is a national airport-operations security provider responsible for pre-board passenger and baggage screening across major airports in Canada. It runs a unionized workforce of 8,000+ screening agents inside a much larger security organization of roughly 132,000 people. When it won one of the largest airport-security contracts in the country's history, it took on the job of keeping every checkpoint, at every airport, staffed every hour by an agent legally cleared to be there.

For years, the rules that decided how thousands of people went to work lived in a row of three-ring binders, one per union collective bargaining agreement. Who was owed the next shift, how overtime was counted, when an agent had to be sent home to rest, how seniority broke a tie. When a scheduler needed to know whether an assignment was even legal, they pulled a binder off the shelf and started reading.

Then the national screening contract had to go live, on a fixed start date, with no soft launch. A pay run had to satisfy multiple union contracts at once, every cycle. Every shift posted had to hold up as fair, and every calculation had to hold up to a federal audit, with biometric clock-in required at every door. The legacy WFM platform in place could not hold that weight, not a shelf of contracts at once, not at this scale, not on this clock.

The question stopped being which features to switch on. It became whether anyone could replace the binders before the first traveller reached the first checkpoint.

The provider needed a platform that treated multiple collective agreements as configuration, not as a custom-development project that never quite finishes. Most WFM platforms can handle one CBA. Some can handle three. This operation needed all of them enforced side by side, in one engine, and it needed the people running the operation to be able to change a rule themselves without filing a ticket and waiting on a vendor.

WorkAxle's compliance engine absorbed seniority bidding, overtime thresholds, rest periods, and statutory-holiday math with no scripting and no custom code. The same thing that made the rules deep, a compliance engine you configure instead of code, is what made them fast to stand up.

One by one, the union contracts came off the shelf and went into WorkAxle's rule engine. The rules that had lived in separate binders, read by hand and interpreted differently depending on who was reading, now lived in one place and applied themselves the same way on every shift, at every airport.

At the checkpoints, clocking in became a face at an approved biometric device. Buddy punching was gone, and every shift carried its own auditable record, exactly the proof a federal screening contract is built to demand. Behind the walls, the HR system fed the workforce in and payroll took the hours out, with no one retyping a timecard. The whole operation was screening passengers on WorkAxle in eight weeks, against an industry norm of twelve to twenty-four months. That is 6.2x faster than the leading competitor's implementation.

A shift that would break a rest period, jump a seniority rule, or trip an overtime threshold now gets flagged the moment it is built, instead of surfacing weeks later in payroll when it is already a fight.

WorkAxle is a compliance-first enterprise workforce management platform, purpose-built for regulated organizations with multi-jurisdiction, multi-union workforces. From demand forecasting to payroll integration, it provides the operational layer for enterprises where labor rules are too complex for generic tools. WorkAxle is a Workday Innovation Partner (Silver), Design Approved and listed on the Workday Marketplace, and an SAP partner (SAP PartnerEdge) with a SAP SuccessFactors integration.