Part of the rub you are going to find in the IT industry is that any solution which saves money is going to require some research and/or training. Getting your hands dirty. It sounds like you are looking for tools, not procedures. One tool which is actively in use and under BSD-style license is
Radmind. The other options involve using cron scripting and file shares to make installer packages available for the systems to copy and install software. This pull method is only as free as the file server you would use.
To do step-by-step on every process is a bit much unless someone else is actively doing this, and if they are doing it they probably don't have enough time to document it.
Best of luck.