This is a question more and more organizations are asking, and rightly so, especially as automation becomes a greater element in so many other security processes. With so many tasks to take care of before and after patches are applied, and with sometimes odd maintenance windows to take advantage of, manual patching can be inconvenient and inefficient in the best of cases.
This is an opportunity to push for automatic scheduling and automatic workflows. Despite a rise in automation in other areas of the enterprise and cybersecurity, patching has been the exception, until recently. Look for end-to-end automation of patching that consolidates processes and orchestrates timely patching across disparate systems.