To be completely honest, I like to think I would go down to where the problem is and have the people dealing with the problem look for a solution first.
If you approach a third party as "a big company" looking for a "solution", you'll just get "a big solution at a bigger price"
I wasn't in that department, but I got a general sense of the budgets, and $8 million sounds orders of magnitude too high for a project like this.