I've no idea on numbers, it was never quantified to my knowledge (and I don't think it really could be). However.... My former organisation had a collection of

I've no idea on numbers, it was never quantified to my knowledge (and I don't think it really could be). However.... My former organisation had a collection of MI reports in their core application to let them track any number of sales metrics. These were all decidedly hard-coded and a pain to change; manually added to the menu screen via source code and linked in with Crystal Reports templates. Frankly I don't think anyone in the IT team liked using Crystal, particularly as the reports were largely just straight results tables. Myself and a colleague were less than fond of this system to put it mildly. I had new business area I was supporting and they needed reports. So, we talked to them about what they wanted and how they'd use them. Discovered Crystal was just being used to export to Excel, so.... One database table was set up to let us bang in new reports without code changes. One class was added to format results sets from the database into a relatively tidy file in Excel. Total time to do those two changes was, I reckon, less than the total time to add a couple of reports the old way, and gave much faster deployment of new reports. On top of this, over the next few months this business area gained more MI reports than the entire rest of the business put together because they were now so quick to produce. If they needed a new stat and we weren't backed up on something else they could normally get it that day. Cost savings? New area, new function, almost impossible to quantify. But I'm sure we saved development cost just on the initial set they'd requested, I know we were this way able to automate some reports they were having to do laboriously by hand before and if they couldn't get more sales off the back of the increased range of stats they asked for and got then I'd be disappointed in the sales & marketing team.