Business View Magazine | March 2020

71 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MARCH 2020 NAVAJO INC . have so much machinery,” insists Soto. “Instead of having to bring engineers in, we can have them record step-by-step how to do the maintenance. We can even send mechanics a link to watch us, what we’re doing, and they can guide us from where they are. We also use the glasses to pick orders. Instead of having an order puller going and using an old-type scanner, picking a ticket, scanning from screen to screen and then reading it back, the smart glasses communicate by voice to them, telling the worker what item to pick, how many to pick, and so on. We’ve gone from picking 34 cases per hour to 260, per picker.” “We also play around with drones,” Soto continues. “We can now do cycle counts through the warehouse with the drone reading the tags. That’s proprietary for us. We designed it. We fly the drone down the aisle, up and down. In 25 minutes, we can scan half the warehouse, which has 15 aisles. It used to take us one day to do two aisles with one person doing the tagging.” With flexibility being the key to a business’ survival in the 21st century, it has served Navajo well to shun the traditional pyramid management structure and transfer a substantial part of its organizational control to the frontline. “That’s how we do business—we really do live off that concept of the inverted pyramid,” Deuschle says. “The shopper matters the most. What do they want and need? We must pay attention to that person first. And then who backs the shopper? It’s always the retailer. So, we’ve got to make sure that we’re satisfying the retailer’s requirements. We can win the minds and hearts of the shopper, but if we don’t get on the shelf, we don’t make a profit. Our customers, our service staff, all the individuals supporting that route, all the people that pick our orders and get them out the door, our suppliers, our purchasing team; they’re our most valuable resources. The executive management—Antonio, myself and Gordon—we’re the very inverted part of that pyramid. We work in support of that