One of the tasks here is the daily generation and collation of statistics across our various platforms to present to the clients. It contains things like the state of the tickets, number of tickets raised/closed, peak data across the platforms, systems metrics for utilisation and other similar things.
Currently these metrics are gathered manually be people eyeing up graphs and manually reading the data from them or running scripts that pull out metrics they need, it went from a half hour task to a 120 minute task, daily, as we've been growing.
I created a scaleable system that polled all the required statistics, from all of the various different systems in place, directly accessing the RRD files that generate graphs, polling our ticketing systems API to access the data, etc etc and then pushed them in to a database which could be polled easily for historic data as well as interrogated via a front end to generate the reports. It even allowed you to alter text in the report and export it to PDF to email to the clients.
After 2 years it's still sat, waiting to be rolled out, because of politics. The guys that run the reports just work from a process document and aren't really good enough to do much else. With the additional free time they have it would be too transparent that they can't do anything other than follow process but we do need them for various other tasks that can't be automated. At least by doing the reports manually they look really useful and the clients are happy..