Unifying Frontline Maintenance Communication
6 Weeks
Live trial, 6 Jul – 16 Aug 2026
3 Shifts
Day, afternoon and night coverage
Full Team
Electrical + mechanical trades
Live
A running plant, not a sandbox
General Mills runs a high-volume plant across three shifts. Frontline comms lived in a personal messaging app: fast and familiar, but never built to hold maintenance information.
Nothing structured happened next
Photos weren't tied to a job, and "resolved" just meant someone replied.
Useful detail got buried
Context scrolled away, leaving the next shift nothing to go on.
Management couldn't see it
The history built between trades stayed invisible.
Breakdown reporting
Photo-based evidence
Corrective works
Safety observations
PDF documentation
Inspections
Management review
Proof of completed works
Capture the work
Take photos like you always do, documenting the job as you go.
Add Context
Notes, location and equipment captured in seconds.
Generate the report
The Sentence That Built Workex Chat
The gap was clear: trades could capture the work in Workex, then had to leave the app to tell the team. So we built Workex Chat. Now the photo goes straight into the right thread, and the image, context and conversation all stay on the record.
We won't use Workex if we can't communicate inside the app. We may as well keep using the group chat.
Senior Tradesperson, General Mills
Lives on personal phones
The history walks out the door the moment a worker leaves.
One shared record
Visible across every shift and to management.
Scrolls away
Photos and context disappear as the chat moves on.
Photos stay on the job
Attached to the report and the corrective work, not lost in a camera roll.
No link to the work
A message never connects to the job it triggered.
Every message ties to a job
The conversation moves the work forward.
A Trial That Turned Into a Design Partnership
Trades and supervisors started surfacing bigger problems, and three shaped the product directly. It fit because founder Ian Cooper came from the same maintenance floor: the work starts with a photo, and supervisors get oversight without the burden landing back on the trades.
Communication
Trades needed to talk inside Workex for it to fit how they worked. That led directly to Workex Chat.
Permit Digitisation
Rather than replacing approved safety processes, Workex recreated the existing permit documentation as a staged path to digitisation.
Enterprise Integration
Workex captures information where the work happens, then makes it available to the systems that rely on it.
Only a fitter would build a platform like this.
Reliability and Maintenance Manager, General Mills
A Trial That Didn't Stop on Schedule
The six-week trial didn't stop on schedule. General Mills kept going, and a frontline reporting trial grew into a broader relationship across the whole site.
Continued Use
The team carried on with Workex past the trial window.
Approved Vendor
Workex cleared General Mills' vendor onboarding and became an approved vendor.
Permits Progressing
Existing permit documentation has been digitised, with the proposed workflow moving through site review and approval.
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The complete case study, with the full flows, the design detail and the whole story of how a frontline trial became a product partnership. Sent straight to your inbox.
