My brother got an internship as an accountant.  One of his duties is a pricing things for the marketing department.  Basically figure out how much all of the components cost and add in all the margins, expected demand etc.  This takes about 3 days to put together a single price.  This is crazy.  It is prone to human error, slow and not robust.  This problem certainly could be automated because all of the pricing info is contained in a database and the materials and components are in the database.  So, all the info is there it just takes a while for a human to search for the things and copy the pricing data and add the margins.  It is a long process.  It would be ideal to also include info about competitors prices.  Then the marketers would instantly be able to know the prices.  Which would allow them to sell products so much faster because the competition wouldn’t even have had time to get a price.

I think that this might be something our company might be able make.  This might be something to talk to Mike about.