Why does the cheapest option often becomes the most expensive?

When you’re selecting an HMI supplier, of course price is always a factor, but it shouldn’t be the only one. In industries like medical, off-highway, agriculture, aerospace, and robotics, where equipment reliability is non-negotiable, the wrong choice doesn’t just cost money, it can lead to downtime, safety risks, and major operational headaches.

We’ve seen it happen more times than we’d like. A company goes with the lowest bidder, thinking they’re getting a great deal, until the failures start rolling in.

The reality…

Bad HMIs are expensive, period. And unfortunately, this isn’t just a one-off story.

Whether you’re designing for off-highway equipment, surgical devices, industrial automation, or aviation controls, an unreliable interface can cause:

  • Production downtime – Operators struggling with unresponsive touchscreens or buttons lead to inefficiencies that add up fast.
  • Service & repair costs – When parts fail in the field, warranty claims, service calls, and technician time become major expenses.
  • Scrapped inventory – If a faulty design isn’t caught early, you’re stuck with unusable stock and wasted materials.
  • Reputation damage – If an HMI fails on a piece of mission-critical equipment, it impacts customer trust – and that’s not easy to win back.

In industries where precision, safety, and uptime matter, a well-designed, reliable HMI isn’t just a preference, it’s a requirement.

Let’s look at a real-world example.

CASE STUDY: When “Cheaper” Became a $7.28 Per-Part Disaster

A company – let’s call them Customer Z – needed a critical HMI component and chose to work with Supplier A because their quoted price was the lowest. The part was $2.35 each, which was significantly cheaper than the next-best option.

Within months, field failures started piling up:

  • 1,200 failed units had to be returned, each costing $75 per failure in service and replacement costs.
  • The failures persisted for 4 months, leading to a $360,000 total loss in returns alone.
  • On top of that, they had 14,000 additional parts in inventory – already paid for – that had to be scrapped, adding another $32,900 in losses.
  • Meanwhile, they had already ordered 80,000 parts over 8 months, making it impossible to pivot quickly.

By the time they switched suppliers, their $2.35 part had effectively cost them $7.28 per unit – a costly lesson in the true price of a poor-quality HMI.

They ultimately moved to Supplier B, whose original quote was $3.75 per part – $1.40 more than Supplier A. But that switch immediately saved them $35,000 per month because failures, downtime, and replacement costs disappeared.

What Does a Good Supplier Actually Save You?

The deciding factor for choosing a supplier should not be the quote price, because the right supplier will save you more than just dollars on a quote. They’ll help you avoid situations like the one Customer Z went through.

A strong HMI supplier should:

✓ Understand your application – Not just build to spec, but think about how your interface will perform in the real world.
✓ Engineer for durability – Whether it’s extreme temperatures, glove use, or heavy vibration, your HMI should be designed for longevity.
✓ Help prevent failures, not just fix them – Catching potential issues early in the design phase saves massive costs down the road.
✓ Support you long-term – If something goes wrong, do they disappear – or do they help you solve the problem?

The goal isn’t to find the cheapest option – it’s to find the right option. Because when an HMI is designed and built properly, it…

Lasts. It performs. It saves you money in the long run.

Getting it right the first time is always the best investment.