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HA! If you make pricing decisions for one of these companies please ignore the next paragraph!

This is one of the reasons enterprises will pay good money for software (even bad software) - because 30,000 users saving 5 minutes per month (1 hr per year) @ $20 an hour is still $600,000 savings per year.

Save them 1 hour per month = $7,200,000 Save them 1 hour per day = $30,000,000

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Though this depends on what kind of time is saved. If I go from thinking while shuffling papers to thinking while sitting at my desk, my company isn't saving money.

This obviously isn't to say that I want to spend more time shuffling papers, and of course having to deal with a task means a context switch (which can sometimes be more expensive than the task itself), my point is simply that the analysis needs to run a bit deeper than "how much time is this saving?"

100% agree, but on repetitive tasks that can be automated it can mean massive time savings.

Think scanning a pallet with 1,000 units via RFID vs manually (just an example I realize there is hardware & software in the example).

For sure. I didn't mean to imply that there weren't cases where automation is a big win.

If I had $10 for ever hour I'd saved, I'd have $1000 every day. In reality, though, "saving an hour" on one task just leads to "getting stuck for an hour" on another task.

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