I have spear-headed the effort to automate builds several times now. Sometimes, it is met with resistance. Sometimes, it is encouraged. But in every case, when the build is automated the end-result blows people away. Comments like "Wow, doing a build is that easy?" are frequently heard. After getting an automated build into your organization, people start seeing many other opportunities to fine-tune the build. "Oooh, wouldn't it be nice if we could schedule this to run at midnight every night?" or "Let's have the build run the test scripts automatically for us" or "Hey, we can add this other utility into the build process to ensure that datasets are closed at design-time!". The results are always well worth the effort. At one company, I took a completely manual build from 4 hours down to double-clicking and 45 minutes. The added benefit of not forgetting steps also made the build more reliable the first time. I imagine results like these are more common than not.
There are several tools out there, and here's my simple list of tools that I find useful. All of them are extensible in the sense that you can create your own actions and have those actions execute whatever you want during the build. In my opinion, that is the absolute best part of creating the build script!
Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.