About BACA Systems
Building the next generation of robotic stone fabrication
Based in Detroit, Michigan, BACA Systems builds robotic machinery that helps stone fabricators replace legacy equipment with more reliable, automated production. With roughly 50 employees, the company is reimagining how stone is cut, moved, and finished through product-driven innovation. Grounded in manufacturing expertise, the team creates differentiated machinery and production methods. These innovations unlock new design possibilities without compromising quality or scalability.
“With Slack, we have traceability, compliance, and a better safety culture.”
The challenge
Microsoft Teams and email could not support the kind of company BACA Systems was becoming
As BACA Systems scaled its operations, internal communication became increasingly fragmented across email, text messages, phone calls, and Microsoft Teams. Critical project details, decisions, and updates were buried in inboxes or chat threads with little visibility beyond the original participants. Email inboxes regularly reached 100 GB storage limits, and finding historical context often meant searching multiple systems with inconsistent results.
“Microsoft Teams was not designed for how we wanted to operate going forward,” said Andrew Russo, VP of Business Systems. Conversations disappeared into private chats, and important information was difficult to recover once another team needed it. These tools didn’t meet the needs of a Salesforce-first company focused on speed, traceability, and shared context.
The same limitations surfaced on the factory floor. They had to track daily forklift inspections on paper cards attached to equipment, with no digital record, no audit trail, and no reliable way to confirm inspections were completed. Safety issues were communicated informally, making it difficult to prove compliance or understand patterns over time.
“Slack was the easy choice for getting us to a more efficient place as a company.”
How BACA Systems works better with Slack
In a few short months, Slack became the operating system where all work happens
BACA Systems rolled out Slack company-wide in September 2025. Especially important for a small business focused on speed, Slack’s modern UI made it easy for teams to move work forward without long onboarding cycles or rigid workflows. In the new Activity 2.0 view, employees have a single, consistent place to stay on top of messages, decisions, and next steps. Reducing the clutter that typically slows teams down in email-centric tools, this is especially appealing to inbox-zero enthusiasts.
Within a few months, Slack became the primary hub for internal work: Nearly all asynchronous communication, decisions, and operational updates now live in Slack channels, where they remain searchable and connected to systems of record.
“All conversations and decisions stay in Slack, so that’s where our knowledge and context live,” said Russo. “We can even spin up Teams meetings right from Slack.” They use a simple slash command to start meetings and keep collaboration going without leaving their central flow of work.
Project delivery, planning, and collaboration stay tied to the record
“A major driver of rapid adoption was Slack’s deep connection with Salesforce,” said Russo, which BACA Systems has used since 2014. Every robot delivery project has a dedicated Salesforce record channel in Slack, bringing facility layouts, power requirements, payments, and installation planning into one shared space. “Teams collaborate around live Salesforce data without leaving Slack, reducing context switching and keeping decisions tied to the record. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Slack is also where the company plans and executes trade shows, like TISE 2026. Each event is managed as a Salesforce campaign record channel, complete with task lists, shipping details, layouts, and updates. This keeps planning centralized and tied directly to downstream sales activity. “It’s so powerful to have all the information we need in one place,” said Russo.
Work happens where people already are
Beyond communication, Slack is the engagement layer for operational work. QR codes on forklifts launch Slack workflows that replace paper inspections with digital records, automated routing, and traceability for compliance — making safety issues easier to surface, triage, and resolve in real time. “Safety issues are logged, prioritized, and closed directly in Slack,” said Russo. “This creates a documented compliance history and a safer operating environment that simply didn’t exist before.”
To support manufacturing, fulfillment, and other operational teams, BACA Systems deployed an inventory agent with Agentforce, turning Slack into a single entry point for inventory intelligence. Employees can ask natural-language questions about stock levels, historical usage, and inbound supply, with responses pulling from work orders, purchase orders, and operations systems. “When people use an Agentforce agent in Slack, they solve problems way faster because they’re not bouncing between 10 different screens trying to piece answers together,” said Russo.
Slack is also where finance and operations teams take action. When a purchase order is created, a structured Slack notification posts directly to the relevant channel, with clear instructions, links to the related contract, and buttons that deep-link into the financial system. “Instead of back-and-forth over email, teams can review and act on purchase orders directly in Slack, using standardized cards that make high-volume notifications easier to scan and respond to,” said Russo.
Helping teams find answers and work more efficiently
As more systems and conversations moved into Slack, Slackbot emerged as a single search interface for the organization, giving employees a faster way to locate past decisions, project context, and operational details without switching tools. “Once our teams started using Slackbot, they realized how much value they can get out of it and are solving problems way faster,” said Russo.
The team continues to evolve their Slack usage to match how they work. Using Block Kit, BACA Systems redesigned Salesforce notifications in Slack to surface the most relevant information at a glance and route actions to the right teams. “Block Kit makes Slack feel like our front door to work, rather than another off-the-shelf tool,” said Russo.
“Rather than forcing people into a specific UI, we bring the data into Slack where work is already happening.”
What’s next
Using Slack as the foundation for continued modernization
Looking ahead, the team’s focus is on deepening existing Slack usage: continuously identifying new ways to leverage Slackbot to automate tasks, accelerate execution, and establish Slack as the primary user interface for work across the organization. The team also plans to expand its use of canvas to hold structured project context and make that information available wherever employees are working. “Once we can get canvases into Agentforce, that’s when it’s really going to take off,” said Russo.
This work builds on broader productivity gains the team already achieved with Salesforce, including doubling sales productivity through AI-powered workflows across the platform. Just as importantly, Slack is where employees go first when they need to get something done; it’s so embedded in how teams work that removing it would meet real resistance. “If we took Slack away, there would be a revolt,” said Russo. “That’s how critical it’s become.”
With an emphasis on innovation and solving problems for its customers, BACA Systems is aligning how it works internally with the outcomes it delivers externally. “We need productivity tools that help us grow revenue without growing headcount,” said Russo. “Slack is our answer.”
