> "in an ideal world you could go up the food chain and say, "hey, if we spend $10,000 on this, we save $100,000 in employee hours". That should be the easiest decision in the world, especially if you could come back in a year and figure out it was really $105,000."
In an ideal world, yes. In the average large organization in the real world, though, very few people care about "saving employee hours". Particularly in middle management.
When a team's workload falls by 50%, there's rarely a magical stream of "useful work" that arises to replace it with. More likely, the team just sits around twiddling their thumbs; you either need to fire them, or concoct some busy work for them (defeating the point of the exercise in the first place).
Middle management are never going to gut their own team, because their headcount is what justifies their own position. This is also why your organization never has the budget for $10,000 - any money defaults to headcount, because headcount entrenches managerial authority.
Unless you're selling to C-suite (and can quantify the headcount reduction), "saving employee hours" is a terrible sales proposition for large enterprises.