It is a valid point, but you also have to factor in how many other people in your company will use it as well?
That factors out. Lets say you have ten users. That may be ten times the time saved, but over the year that's also ten times more man-hours. The values stay constant relative to each other.
No, what I am saying is a CAD Manager invests say 10 hours in creating a LISP routine that 50 users are going to use. That is a lot different than investing 10 hours in something one user will use.
That being said, let's take a look at the numbers with a command that gets used a modest 25 times in one day per user. Let's say the command typically takes 2 minutes to run and you are able to cut it down to 1 minute. Well, each user has now saved 25 minutes per day. At 50 work weeks of 5 days a week, that equals out to be approximately 100 hours a year per user. At an average billable rate of $50 per hour, that is $5,000 per year, per user in billable times that has been saved. And that is saving just 25 minutes per day per user. Now, if you are a company with say 50 users, that's $250,000 per year in billable time that is saved. Even for just one user, that's three AutoCAD licenses of savings each year.
Even at half the savings, that is still a huge chunk of money. It's amazing how fast the savings can add up, isn't it?
So was 10 hours of the CAD Manager's time, even at the full $50 per hour billable rate, which would come out to $500, a good investment? I think it was given the end savings per year and hopefully it is something the CAD Manager doesn't need to revisit every single year, then the savings are even better.
