Rikor
How Rikor, Russia's largest electronics manufacturer, uses the Pachca team chat app
About the company
I'm Anton Gromov, vice president of the Rikor group of companies. We're one of the biggest electronics manufacturers in Russia, and our holding company is among the top 30 largest IT companies.
Every day, our plant in Arzamas produces more than 10,000 units, with more than 1,200 employees working on them. Our products include laptops, servers, PCs and mini PCs, and our customers include the largest holding companies and state corporations.
Life before Pachca
All our office departments communicated in Slack, and that's where our most important information lived. In early 2022, out of the blue, we got one of those dreaded emails saying we'd be blocked because we were a Russian legal entity. Our holding had foreign companies, so we moved to a foreign legal entity. We carried on like that for two years, until in 2024 we got a second dreaded email: we'd be blocked in 30 days because of employees located in Russia. After that, we urgently started looking for an alternative among Russian services.
The moment we knew Pachca was the one
We looked at the market and realized Pachca has no real alternatives right now, especially if you want features and quality comparable to Slack. We've worked with great teams and cutting-edge products. So it's pretty easy for us to tell whether a service is the right one just by looking at the interface, the feature list and the website.
How Pachca changed the way we communicate
95% of the Slack features we needed either stayed the same or got better after switching to Pachca. The remaining 5% don't matter at all.
One thing that's much more convenient in Pachca is how you organize your workspace.
In Slack, a chat name had to be a single word, so we had to come up with all sorts of dashes, underscores and so on. Now you can give a chat a multi-word name and add icons, which is much simpler. For example, we put a laptop icon on every laptop production channel, and nobody gets confused. Scanning the chat list has become much easier for everyone.
We're also glad to have a Russian-language interface again. Slack recently went English-only, and not all of our employees are comfortable with that.
Tips for making the switch
Every move is different when it comes to getting the team ready. Some companies have more IT teams, and switching is easier for them. Others have fewer and need to prepare more thoroughly.
When you change services, it's important to prepare employees ahead of time for the fact that it's inevitable. That's exactly what we did: "Folks, Armageddon is coming in a month, so we're starting to prepare now and looking for a service to switch to"
Then it's best to set aside a period when employees have access to both services, the old one and the new one. That way, anyone can still write in the old service if they can't figure out the new app or run into problems using it. This keeps communication flowing while people get used to the new service.
