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Technology, Competition - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Price increases due to government decisions affect our business. In keeping with ink costs, we've seen an increase of 15% since 2017 (Errera, 2021). This equals $41,000/year for our company.
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    - - Consumers are becoming more "green" and with printers needing replaced every 3-5 years that create hazardous e-waste we could be looked at poorly (The Environmental Costs, 2017).
    - - We have no real technology besides our shipping software. We could reduced labor costs by up to 30% with robotic automation (The True Cost Of, 2021, para. 16)
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    - - 111 trees cut down, 132,068 gallons of water used, 49 million watts of energy used, 86 gallons of crude oil used (The Environmental Costs, 2017).
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    - - Employees have rights and laws to protect them. Computers don't. Employees cost roughly 1.25-1.4 their base salary due to this and other costs (U.S. Small Business Administration, 2019, para. 1). Reducing labor with technology would save us this money.
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    - - Over the last decade the government has been pushing harder for companies to be more environmentally friendly. If we throw away 70-80% of toner cartridges that equals 70-80/ year (Cai, n.d., para. 10) - not a good look.
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- - - - We have little competition in our region and that's a good thing. We don't have the technology to compete with other players in our area and we continuously lose business to other companies that aren't close to us at all due to this. We don't use any of the modern technologies that were outlined by Saad (n.d.) and that puts us behind the curve.
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    - - Our average wage is $16.50/hour while the average hourly wage in our region is $27.20 (Average Salary In Traverse City, Michigan, n.d.). This puts us in a position of trying to hire employees way under the average salary.
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    - - Printing 1,000,000 pick sheets a year produces a lot of waste. Most of our competitors have digitized this portion of their fulfillment.This saves them 132,068 gallons of water, 49 million watts of energy, and 86 gallons of crude oil every year compared to us.
    - - 70% of our current client base is either internationally based or ships internationally. China is one of our largest shipping partners. As Feng (2021) explains, China has decided to implement sanctions that could severely hurt these clients business with us (para. 3).
    - - We've tried building in-house software to accompany our lack of fulfillment service, however we have to be careful not to step on copyright laws. Companies like ShipBob have a tight lock on fulfillment software that we need (Order Fulfillment Software, n.d.).
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    - - American's no longer accept low wages, even for entry level positions. With wage increases of 4.2% in 2021, and more coming in 2022, we've been forced to increase our starting wage 3 times in 2021 for an overall increase of $3/hour (Rugaber, 2021, para. 5).