I disagree with you. If there was excess manpower, graduate students wouldn't be stressed out with overwhelming work. Obviously, there is a lot more work to go around and less bodies to give it to.
Most of the research man-hours is gone trying to implement other people's research-methods so you have a 'baseline.' A complete waste of time just to have one graph in the Results section of your publication. The height of research inefficiency is to replicate someone else's results and hope (finger's crossed) that you followed their 8-page paper (that took them 10 months to develop) meticulously.
Academic researchers only care about results, it is the graduate students that need to be efficient. The efficiency software should be bought by the PIs for their graduate students.
After researching this field (biomedical R&D) a bit, I found that the mindset and workflow is mostly pre-computers. The relevant decision makers in the labs usually don't see a need to change something because "it works" and "it's done always this way".
"its always done this way" is the ultimate motivation of any startup. We wouldn't have any competing startups if everyone just accepted that, probably, not have any entrepreneurs or have a better world for that matter. The fitness function of the world will flatline.
The trick is, academics often have excess manpower capacity in the form of grad students and post-docs. Even though personell is usually one of the highest expenses on any given grant, they often don't look at ways to improve the efficiency of their research man-hours.
That's not a blank rule, as we have definitely had success with the value proposition of research efficiency, but in general, a lot of things business adopt to improve project time (like Theory of Constraints project management, Mindset/Skillset/Toolset matching of personel et) is of no interest to academic researchers.