Payroll and Processes: Balancing Decisions to Win Big

It’s the best time of the year for sports fans right now. College football is in conference play and the NFL is in high gear. The NHL and NBA are getting started. But the single best part of it all is Major League Baseball playoffs. Despite early season prognostications and an up and down season, my hometown Cleveland Guardians won their division and even advanced in the playoffs.?

While I spent time writing for my friends at Factory of Sadness years ago, this space is typically focused on my actual work for Konica Minolta talking about software and workflows and “digital transformation”. Why bring up baseball? Because this team, and this sport in general, aligns with how important it is to make the right investments, not just the largest ones.

Take for example my beloved Guardians. Picked by many to finish last with one of the lowest payrolls in all of baseball. They had an astonishing 17 players make their Major League debuts in 2022. They were the youngest team in the league. Yet, they won 92 games and won their division by double digit games. The team that finished second in their division, the Chicago White Sox, had nearly 2.5 times the payroll. That’s a successful season by any standards without having to be the biggest spender.?

It’s not just about buying a tool, but making sure the people using it are enabled to add value to the team.

On the bench, there were the right investments made as well. Terry Francona is one of the highest paid managers in baseball. Seems counterintuitive to the previous paragraph, but the point here is about making the right investment decisions. Francona earns approximately $4 million to serve as the manager. Meanwhile, the single highest paid player in baseball, Max Scherzer, makes just north of $43 million per year. Without a two-time World Series manager, how can a team with no payroll like the Guardians win a division and make a postseason run? Without that kind of managerial experience, this team doesn’t win 93 games.

When it comes to digital transformation and the work I get to do for Konica Minolta, there are similar decisions we help organizations make that mirror the investment decisions the Guardians made leading up to this season. No organization, the Guardians included, has unlimited resources to simply buy a solution to address their challenges (ok…except for the Yankees). There is a balance between the hard cost, the soft cost, and the impact those decisions will have on the people that make up the organization. It’s never just as simple as taking a piece of software off the shelf.?

I’ve always thought of Konica’s work in digital transformation as a way to connect the people in an organization to the platforms that optimize their processes. It’s not just about buying a tool, but making sure the people using it are enabled to add value to the team. Like baseball, management decisions put players in a position to be individually successful for team wins. For software tools like Robotic Process Automation platforms or Content Services solutions like OnBase by Hyland, a similar balance is required for those solutions to add real value. It’s the right combination of software capabilities, professional services, and client support that must come together to make it all successful.?

It’s not about making the biggest investment, but the right ones. Konica Minolta is uniquely positioned to bring market leading tools to our customers with expert guidance and support. Whether it’s about making processes more efficient or simply trying to find out where to start, we’ve got the right people and platforms to make your processes better. Let us help you win your “division title” in whatever your market happens to be.

Joe Russo is an Intelligent Information Management Account Executive with Konica Minolta, a Hyland Software Platinum Elite Partner and a 2020 Kofax Partner of the Year. Joe has previously contributed to the The OnBase Blog and The Hyland Blog. His work has also appeared on Mic.com, The Fraternity Advisor, and Factory of Sadness, a Cleveland sports website operated by Fansided.