Amen brother! I hear that. The first thing I do when I move into a new area is see what's being done manually that could be done by a program.
At my current job, the previous employee used to manually log into about 40 different instances of an application (one for each person) to check the status of jobs. Me, being the creatively lazy person I am, found the db tables that held the status of the jobs, and wrote a web page to display said status. We now have close to 150 customers - and I don't spend all day logging in to the application.