I can give you an example from my career. We were building out a new webapp feature to deliver medical textbooks, which we had as xml documents direct from the publisher. Our customers, mostly large academic libraries and medical research companies, would get the electronic access to the books for much less than it would cost to get sufficient physical copies, and our cost for supplying the books would be minimal.
A problem came up. Many of the libraries were government funded, and required physical possession of any books they purchased. I was in a meeting with the c-level execs, sales directors, and pms, and they were planning out the cost of building an organization that would produce a cd-rom version of the textbook products. They were going to need a large team to manage creating the books on cd, and for managing the production and mailing of the CDs when orders were received. It was going to cost a fortune.
I told them to hang on a minute: I'm already converting the xml for these books into html for display in the app. I can easily generate static html too, write it to disk, and generate an iso file, every time we publish a new book. Then I can add a download link in the webapp, and if they need a physical copy they can download and burn it to disk themselves. We'll include instructions. This will take me maybe an extra week, and we'll have no ongoing operational costs.
I think I got a $50 Amazon gift card for that suggestion. Or maybe a Starbucks card.