I used to work at a company that also does "material handling" (fancy way of saying "conveyor belts, etc.") for factory automation.

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.

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"

It’s being inflation adjusted.

When replicating a meme, change something. That way you can track how your version propagates.

No it doesn't, it's always been $9M (or, at least, 10M was how I've always heard it). What did you hear that was more than $11M?

I'm sure they spent well over $10k doing it which shows you one of the problems with over-engineered solutions.