31% wage cost savings across 1,400+ locations.

The customer is a leading pharmacy retailer in Saudi Arabia, with 25,000+ employees and mobile workers operating 1,400+ retail pharmacies, clinics, and distribution warehouses across the kingdom. As a publicly listed company under Saudi labor law, every shift, break, and hour has to hold up to an audit, across a workforce that reaches well beyond the pharmacy counter into mobile field teams, delivery staff, and clinical support.

Across 1,400+ small sites with light on-the-ground supervision, attendance ran on trust. People clocked in and out at will. Timecards drifted, and hours accumulated that nobody could verify. Across a network this size, the wage leakage was not incidental: it was structural.

For a publicly listed company operating under Saudi labor law, that created two compounding problems. Every shift, break, and hour had to hold up to an audit. And the workforce reached well beyond the pharmacy counter into mobile field teams, delivery staff, and clinical support who never reported to a fixed site, a segment that had been operating largely outside any centralized tracking. Underneath it all sat a stack of legacy systems that did not talk to each other, each generating its own version of the truth.

So the question stopped being which platform had the longest feature list. It became whether a single system could verify who was on site, confirm they were actually there, and close the gap between hours recorded and hours worked, across 1,400+ locations, on a timeline the business could live with. The retailer evaluated dozens of vendors, including the major global incumbents, to find out.

Verifying presence across 1,400+ small sites is not a setting you toggle on. Standard location methods did not hold in the Saudi context: cell towers are spaced too far apart for reliable triangulation at small retail sites, and GPS geofencing can be spoofed. It demanded a platform that could prove, before the clock started, that the right person was physically at the right site, on every punch, everywhere.

Of the dozens of vendors the retailer evaluated, that capability is what separated the platforms built for this reality from the ones that were not. WorkAxle combined Scheduling and Time & Attendance with a compliance rule engine and spoof-resistant location validation that handled the hardest problem in the network natively.

The hardest problem went in first. Because standard location methods could not be trusted at this scale, WorkAxle deployed physical beacons at sites across the network, giving each location a precise, spoof-resistant reference point. Before the clock starts, the system confirms the employee is physically present at that beacon. There is no workaround.

Beacons confirmed the where. Identity validation at clock-in confirmed the who: that the person on the timecard was the person on site. Together they closed buddy punching, and what flowed out the other side was clean, auditable data.

The field teams, delivery staff, and clinical support who had operated outside centralized tracking came onto the same platform as everyone else, and the fragmented legacy stack collapsed into a single operational layer integrated with the retailer's existing HR and payroll systems.

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.