Overwhelmed trying to find a solution. TLDR Engineering services company looking for a Microsoft based solution for client portal as well as other features.

Ultimately the question I have is: How does one go about finding a developer or development house. It’s so overwhelming to really find an entity that isn’t either just selling service after service, trying to shoe horn you into their solution or either so cheap or expensive that it seems sketchy. I will be the first to admit that good work is worth paying for. That’s not what I’m trying to avoid by any means. But my encounters have led me to believe that some ‘shops’ just expect you to fork up a ton of money on faith without much else that they do on the front end to provide reassurance that they will provide a solution and are listening to my needs. They seem to just want that sale first and then figure things out later.

So long story long: I am an engineer for a small engineering services company. We mostly provide compliance support regarding fairly technical work. Most of our clients are repeat customers. Our current solutions for which are no longer useful in light of continued growth feature a myriad of home built tools, spreadsheet, phone calls and lots of email. The process is arduous and stands to be improved tremendously which will make both the customer as well as the engineer’s experiences much better, faster and cheaper.

We’re primary Microsoft based already; Outlook, LOTS of Word and Excel documents with tons of VBA surround the later two. And we’ve been dipping our toes into Sharepooint and Onedrive so it seems like MS is the path we’d like to remain on. I began looking for solutions and first came across PowerApps and Power Automate. That seemed doable for some of us to tackle in house, but I realized that if we were going to go all in with this we might as well research off the shelf solutions or hire a developer to manage the solution we’d like to have. The developer route makes so much more sense because there’s just a dizzying number of products MS offers not to mention the add-on that work in tandem with the MS tools.

The off the shelf solutions seem like they’d get us 80% of the way so we’ve pretty much walked away from that but are still entertaining demos from some companies to see if there is a off the shelf, but tweakable solution. It’s seeming like a combination of MS products and some possibly .Net stuff is what the solution is but I haven’t been able to get a clear understanding so far.

Any help or suggestions or insight or anything would be greatly appreciated. How does one find a company that develops solutions like this? I’m way out of my element here. It seems like it may even be better to hire a consultant first to navigate these waters so that we can then higher someone to build the tool.

For what it’s worth I’ll provide more details about the solution we’re interested in.

Like I mentioned above we provide compliance support for a fairly technical and niche section of an industry. Most of our clients are repeat customers. The clients often have multiple sites and at each site more than one project that we’re hired at. We currently have a very basic database for storing our projects, but we want to revamp that and provide a modern solution. We’d like a portal for our clients (or 3rd party entities) that allows them to keep track of the documentation about each of their sites (as it relates to the scope of our work) and the compliance reporting that we develop about the site. That way they could log in select a specific site, or pull information about all of their sites. It would track the status of current project. There’d be a dash board etc.

Kind of a side, but interrelated branch of this, is a quote request page. A guest or current client could access the page and provide a basic amount of information about their site/equipment and select from a list of services that they’d like. Base on the selection there may be a few automated changes to the quote request page but it would essentially guide them through the process. They don’t often entirely understand what it is they need to do to fulfill their compliance obligations so page of this purpose of this page would be to provides tips and or education to help them understand what it is they need.

Once the request is received, an engineer would generate a quote. Most of the time this results in a PO from the customer. Once the PO is received we then need to request a bunch more documentation about the site/equipment. If it was an existing customer and existing site, the documentation could already be available from the portal, but if it wasn’t then a document request page would then be sent to the client and based on the scope selection, it would be tailored to asked only what is necessary. There are certain scope selections that would make most of the documentation request unnecessary. Conversely, if it was a large scope we may need to request a lot of information.

From the moderate number of meetings I’ve had with some development houses and companies with existing solutions, the details we’d like in our solution are not that complicated. But the pricing varies wildly and I just feel ill-equipped to navigate this space.

Looking for thoughts/tips/suggestions anything really.