Transforming Access to Social Services Across Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development carries one of the most human-facing responsibilities in the Kingdom: connecting citizens in need with the social programs and benefits they are entitled to. Every month, thousands of requests come in from people seeking support across housing, social security, care, and employment programs.

For years, processing those requests was slow, fragmented, and difficult to manage at scale. Citizens had no way to track their requests. Ministry employees had no unified view across services. And the technology holding it all together was not built for the demand it was carrying.

Sumerge had previously worked with MHRSD to build an eligibility management system. When the ministry was ready to take the next step and fully digitize its e-services, they came back to Sumerge to build the platform that would make it happen.

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The people who rely on HRSD programs often have few other options. Delays in processing their requests are not administrative inconveniences, they are real gaps in support for citizens.

But the ministry's teams were working against systems that made speed nearly impossible. Once a citizen submitted a request, there was no way to track what happened to it. Employees across different business divisions worked in isolation, with manual processes and no shared view of requests or statuses. Building or updating a service meant developing each application from scratch, with no shared infrastructure to build on. And connecting new services to existing back-end systems was a technical challenge every single time.

This led to slow service delivery, limited visibility, and a growing backlog that employees could not reasonably clear at the pace citizens needed.

Sumerge redesigned HRSD's service delivery infrastructure using a microservices architecture, replacing the fragmented legacy setup with a connected, scalable platform where each service is independent and can be updated or expanded without affecting the others.

For citizens, the change was immediate and visible: a self-service portal where they could access all ministry services online, from any device, without visiting a branch. For ministry employees, it meant a unified platform where services could be implemented, managed, and updated without rebuilding everything from scratch each time.

Twenty business services were deployed on the platform at launch. The API layer was designed so that any mobile application could connect to the same services, giving MHRSD flexibility to extend its reach across channels over time.

Business rules and eligibility logic were centralized through IBM ODM, so changes only needed to be made once and applied everywhere. Integration was built between the citizen portal and the ministry's existing back-end systems, removing the manual handoffs and paper-based steps that had slowed things down before.

Sumerge also delivered a comprehensive training program to ensure MHRSD's own team could manage, maintain, and grow the platform independently.

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• Faster time-to-market for new services, with new programs launched without disrupting existing ones

• Improved service ratings as citizens experienced faster, more reliable access to support

• Full team self-sufficiency — MHRSD's in-house engineers can onboard, maintain, and expand the platform without external dependency

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data-stat-source-start

100%

of HRSD business services fully automated

+2M

registered users served within the first few months of launch

+16K

new users registering in a single month

data-stat-source-end

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• NET Framework

• AngularJS

• Team Foundation Server

• Service Discovery (Eureka)

• Selenium

• NUnit and ELK Stack

• IBM Operational Decision Management (ODM)

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The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development (HRSD) is the Saudi government body responsible for human resources development, labor market regulation, and the delivery of social welfare programs across the Kingdom. As Saudi Arabia advances its Vision 2030 agenda, MHRSD plays a central role in empowering citizens, supporting the most vulnerable, and building a future-ready workforce