Reply to post:

30 years ago I remember an office department manager asking me, a programmer, how to improve his assistant's productivity. Every morning his assistant would log into a commercial off-the-shelf software program to run a bunch of reports to manually input into a spreadsheet to help measure sales, commissions, and goals. I analyzed the process, wrote some COBOL or RPG II program on a DEC VAX, and presented a new daily batch procedure that the assistant could run instead. My five hours of programming saved an hour each day of the assistant's time so that the assistant could spend more time on other needs. Those were the days.