The problem with getting the good key users to work on your project is, that the good key users who know all the stuff are busy in the daily production work, and taking them away from the daily production means chaos and mayhem there, at least to the other, less structured cow-orkers. So the three best methods of subverting/creating automation in my experience are to either learn the job myself so I can analyze what can be automated, or to talk to a person knowing the process from end to end with analytical knowledge, who has ideas of their own what to automate and/or to implement various small applications that have no UI and that automate single steps of the whole process.