[bluGill]

All too often the cost of automation is higher than the cost of just doing the work manually each time. While the example case that doesn't seem to be true, it isn't clear if they did the analsys. if the manual project took 5 minutes every week and the automation took 2 engineers 2 weeks, it will be 2000 weeks before the automation effort pays off - will you need it that long - don't forget that if the process changes you have even more effort in automation, now add in interest on the investment...

Of course as time goes on we get better automation tools. what used to not be worth automating often is today.

Don't forget that humans tend to be good at noticing "thats funny" situations while automation will pass many of those situations because you didn't think about them and thus didn't handle that error. This is why despite being a big deliver in automated tests I still demand a large amount of time spent in manual testing everything.