Automation.
While the process of building the product was already automated (via make), the process of creating product images (CDs or DVDs) was not. Nor the testing, nor the test management (producing reports to keep manager-types happy), nor the unit tests.
I'm still working on it, but over the years, I've managed to "steal" resource to automate things (by "stealing" I mean "I told my manager I was deferring work s/he has assigned to me and doing this first" as opposed to "I asked my manager to let me work on automation").
I've met with varying degrees of success. I had the test management completely automated at one point (well, as automated as it could be without the tests themselves being fully automated), but then I moved on to the next item, and testing got reassigned to another team who then proceeded to completely munge it up.
I do find it a constant battle, however. Some co-workers think that a one-off manual process is fine. I take every opportunity, however, to beat them over the head with the utter lack of foresight, when (not if) someone asks us to do it again. Even when they originally told us it would never be requested again.