Case Study – Staff Management System for Saudi Arabia’s Government

Each year, millions of pilgrims attend Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. At peak hours, over 70,000 pilgrims used the metro to travel between holy sites such as Masjid al Haram, Mount Arafat, Jamarat and Mina to perform their rituals. Over 7,000 staffs were responsible for the operations and crowd management at the metro stations. Therefore, the management of staffs would be crucial to ensure efficient movement of pilgrims, and their safety and security.

Vision Skill Consulting and DXC were invited by Saudi Arabia’s government to design and deliver a multi-user technology solution for staff and crowd management during Hajj. The purpose of the project is to deploy technology to ensure safe, smooth, prompt and secure operations by facilitating pilgrims’ movement, deploying staff members to the critical areas, monitoring pilgrims and staff activities, and facilitating communications between all parties. After careful study and assessment, we developed and implemented a bilingual English and Arabic staff management application system which comprise of iStaff, a mobile application for operations staff to facilitate crowd control, and 5DCC, a web application for management and controllers to monitor operations staff. We provided trainings to the users of the system.

We have also established a 24×7 Crowd Control Command Centre and nine Station Crowd Control Centres to oversee and monitor staff deployment, and track crowd movement in real-time. The real-time data and analytics enable the government and the metro operator to better allocate staff, achieve optimisation of human resources, and, hence, achieve better crowd control result. Immediate response and action could be delivered in case of emergency. The key objectives of the staff management application system include:

• Capture staff attendance with their locational positioning
• Provide staff with key functions like sign-in and sign-out (registration for working hours), train schedules, staff rosters, messaging, panic alerts to first responders (medical, fire, flood, derailment etc.), and optimum evacuation routes in case of emergency
• Facilitate communications between staff, their supervisors and the Crowd Control Command Centre as well as the Station Control Centres
• Manage and ensure accuracy of staffing and number of employed operations staff at various tasks in metro stations provided by local and international subcontractors
• Overall attendance and individual staff activity dashboard for management