Why We Stopped Buying the Cheapest Automation Components
Let me get this out of the way: if you're measuring an automation purchase by the number at the bottom of a quote, you don't know what it costs yet. I run procurement for a 140-person systems integrator. Roughly $350,000 a year across ABB PLCs, drives, motor starters, and low-voltage electrical gear. I've signed about 200 purchase orders over six years, and I've learned one thing the hard way: the cheapest drive on the quote is almost never the cheapest drive in the plant.
Not because I like overpaying. Because the real bill doesn't arrive with the invoice. It arrives six weeks later, at 2 a.m., when something stops working.
The First Hidden Bill: Downtime
When a PLC or a VFD fails in operation, you don't lose the part. You lose the line. The work-in-progress. The operator who's on a piece rate. The customer who's waiting for a callback.
In November 2023, we quoted a mid-size packaging line retrofit. The client had a tight turnaround. We bought a batch of non-brand drives to hit the budget — 11 units, roughly $85 cheaper per unit than the premium option. Three months later, two of them started tripping under load. Not a disaster. But the client noticed.
Rework, replacement, and a discount we didn't plan for cost us just over $4,100 at the end of it. And that doesn't count the phone call from the client asking whether the rest of the installation was going to hold up. That call cost more than $85 ever saved.
The Second Hidden Bill: Support
When you buy ABB PLCs — especially the AC500 line — from a proper distributor, you're not buying a box. You're buying someone who knows the platform. Firmware revision history. Spec sheets that trace back to a source. Someone you can call at 2 a.m. and ask whether the analog module maps to this base unit or the other one.
I tracked this. On average, we spend about 20 minutes on the phone with distributor tech support per ABB controller installation. With discounted alternatives, I don't have hard data across every project, but my sense from keeping a rough log is that the same troubleshooting runs closer to 90 minutes — often because nobody on the other end has worked with that firmware version.
Not every alternative is bad. Some are actually pretty good. But the variance is the problem. You don't know which one you're getting until it's already installed. After three months of that, my back-of-envelope estimate is that the part-price savings get eaten up in engineering hours inside a week.
The Third Hidden Bill: What Your Clients See
This is the one that's hardest to put a number on, and it's the one that matters most.
We do industrial automation integration. Clients hire us precisely so they don't have to think about this stuff. They don't grade resistors on tolerance. They grade the panel on whether it runs or it stops.
When a critical line goes down because a cheap component failed, the client doesn't blame the component. They blame us. Last year, three of our long-standing clients specifically asked that all future projects use established automation brands. Not because it was in the contract. Because they'd been burned before.
Perceived reliability compounds. So does the opposite. Every install we do goes back to the same five or six client plants, and they talk to each other.
The Counterintuitive Part: Cheap Parts Push Good People Out
This one caught me off guard. It's the argument I did not expect to hold up as well as it does.
Senior automation engineers do better work on better systems. They don't want to spend a Tuesday fighting with a controller that doesn't have modern tooling support, doesn't have a stable IDE, and doesn't have a community of people who've already solved the problem they're stuck on.
Our controls lead has been programming on ABB platforms for about six years. He can pull up Automation Builder and have a basic AC500 routine running in under an hour. Hand him a no-name controller with a flaky IDE and no documentation and you're looking at three days of him being annoyed — and half a week of the project slipping.
We tried this once in 2022 on a small retrofit. Project ran three weeks. Under normal conditions it'd have been five days. Our guy didn't slack — he just couldn't move at his usual pace in a tool that fought him the whole way. The labor overrun was somewhere around $4,000, which was more than the hardware line item we were trying to protect. And honestly? He was pretty close to quitting over it.
“What If the Budget Is Tight?”
Fair question. I hear it every quarter. And it's a real constraint — not every application needs a premium PLC or a smart drive. Sometimes a cheap contactor or a basic timer on a non-critical panel is the right call, and I'll make that call without hesitating.
But here's where I draw the line: will this equipment ever touch a client's production floor, or end up with the client's logo in front of it? If the answer to both is no, save the money. If the answer to either is yes, buy quality.
Our internal rule now: any component that can stop a client line has to come from a first- or second-tier brand with documented support. No exceptions, no “just this once.”
What “Value” Actually Means Here
Price is what you pay. Value is what you keep. After 200-odd purchase orders, I've stopped asking “what's the unit cost.” Now I ask two questions:
- What does it cost to get this thing running again if it fails? That answer sets the ceiling on a reasonable premium.
- When our client walks past this panel, what do we want them to see? That answer sets whether brand choice matters at all.
For ABB PLCs and drives — and specifically for the AC500 ecosystem, where software, training, and distributor support are genuinely connected — the premium usually pays itself back across downtime, support hours, and client confidence. It's not automatic. The selection has to fit the application, and the distributor has to actually be competent, not just authorized. Quality isn't printed on the box. It shows up in the deployment.
If you're building a drive or controller wholesale buying list for next year, that's the axis I'd sort on. Not price. Worse-case cost.
Trust me on this one. I've got the spreadsheet to prove it, and I'd rather not add another row.