I highly doubt the assessment that it would take 10x more people. If you let a consultancy do it, sure. Any normal medium sized IT company no. The problem with the assessment is invested time, since the invested manhours and failures over all the years of dodgy excel sheets is simply unmeasurable.
The typical problem is that the organisation simply does not have the competence at the correct level to actually order the correct thing from the medium-sized IT company.
In the past, the organisation has probably tried (maybe even several times) to replace the Excel mess with an IT system, only to receive something that costs them a lot of money and solves the wrong problem..
Interesting gap in the market there, someone who can solve that can probably make a lot of money. With the help of AI, of course! /s
I guess the solution is to have an intermediary that can be the in-between, but don't have them be from the IT systems supplier, because they'll bone you (including promising you everything you want without checking with their developers if any of it is possible; with a good 3rd party they'd be able to ask the devs if it's possible and to see a proof-of-concept).
The problem is that is usually costs more than they are willing to spend in a year to get a working system. It's hard to justify spending ~1 million to replace an existing working system. Even if it would pay for itself after a couple of years, business finances don't really work that way.
