Diskar

About the company

I'm Artyom, head of development at Diskar. We're an IT company that builds business apps and services for logistics and for automating warehouses and retail stores.

Our clients include VirbacAvto and Shinservice. They're among the largest chains in Russia selling tires, wheels, batteries and auto parts, with a large truck fleet and 100+ stores and service centers across the country. We build online stores, B2B platforms and internal logistics services for them.

Our workflows depend on fast communication, so a team chat app has always been important to us.

Life before Pachca

Before Pachca, we tried a lot of team chat apps. We started with Slack. It suited us perfectly, and we built convenient workflows in it. At some point we lost access to it and started looking for alternatives. We decided to go with open-source apps and rolled out Mattermost. Back then it seemed like the best alternative: more or less free, and it let us keep our data on our own servers.

In reality, things turned out to be more complicated, and we ran into problems: it was a pain to deploy and maintain, push notifications often didn't work, we had to download updates through workarounds and calls kept dropping.

The thing is, Mattermost is a big product, and it's hard to deploy and configure in general. There are no quick deployment scripts or packages you just install and have everything up and running. Our DevOps engineers found that keeping it running still took time and effort on top of their main work. You have to know every nuance of the documentation, build it with your own keys and go through the whole process again with every update.

Updates were a separate problem. Even though Mattermost is open source, it still depends heavily on updates, and it has quite a few bugs that those updates fix. And since the company left Russia, getting them isn't easy either, so you have to find workarounds.

We got past all of that, but then problems started with the service itself: push notifications and calls kept dropping every now and then.

That's when we realized we couldn't manage without optimizing the app on our end, so we decided to switch to Telegram plus Skype for calls. But Telegram was no good at all as a team chat app. It had no threads, no access levels and no member directory, and every new employee had to be added to and removed from chats by hand.

Right around then, Skype was discontinued and automatically moved us to Microsoft Teams. We tried it for internal communication right away and became fully convinced it was time to find a convenient team chat app built for our needs. That app turned out to be Pachca.

How Pachca changed the way we communicate

Something new for us is that we started actively using cross-chat threads. Some of our chats often overlap on tasks, say, the DevOps, Frontend and Backend team chats and a general development chat. When someone, like a frontend developer, is discussing a task with their team in a thread and hits a backend question, they just tag the person who should answer. That person joins the discussion even if they aren't in the chat. No need to DM them or forward messages.

Otherwise, we got back all the convenience we had before.

Tips for switching

Every company is different here, so I can only point out a few things:

• If you're an IT company or rolling out the app to your IT department, you don't need to put a lot of effort into onboarding. Most likely, nobody will have trouble understanding the features. In moves like these, it's better to focus on whether the app's features can support all the automations you already have or want to add in the future.
• If you plan to move business departments or store staff, take explaining things much more seriously. Run pilots in different departments and try different formats of guides and employee training. Otherwise, you'll find that everyone keeps using good old Telegram