Why I’m Still Picking Interroll Drives After 6 Years of Auditing Our MRO Spend

If you're evaluating motorized roller solutions for a material handling system, here's my conclusion after six years of tracking procurement data: Interroll's platform typically delivers the lowest total cost of ownership for mid-to-high volume operations—when you factor in everything, not just the unit price.

That's not a casual opinion. I manage MRO procurement for a mid-sized distribution center. We process about 45,000 orders monthly. And I've spent the last six years building a cost tracking spreadsheet that logs every invoice, every repair ticket, and every unscheduled downtime event. It's not pretty, but it's thorough.

Why TCO matters more than the sticker price

When I started this role in 2019, my mandate was simple: cut costs. So I did what most procurement folks do—I shopped for the lowest initial quote. I found a vendor offering a drum motor for about 18% less than our incumbent Interroll supplier. The specs looked comparable. I placed a trial order for twelve units.

That pilot taught me an expensive lesson. The 'cheaper' units had a higher failure rate—about three times higher in the first 18 months. Every failure meant a service call, lost throughput, and a rush replacement order. When I ran the numbers after two years, the 'savings' had evaporated. We were actually spending more on that vendor's product line when you accounted for labor and downtime.

This gets into cost engineering territory that isn't my core expertise. What I can tell you from a procurement perspective is: never sign off on a drive component quote without a TCO model that includes at least a 24-month service horizon.

What the spreadsheet revealed about Interroll

After that pilot, I standardized our vendor evaluation framework. Every candidate gets scored on five dimensions: unit price, lead time reliability, failure rate (from our own data or peer references), repair cost, and energy consumption. I track all of this in a shared workbook.

Across six years and about $180,000 in cumulative spend on drive components, Interroll scores consistently well. Their failure rate is low—under 2% in our dataset—and when something does go wrong, the modular design means we can swap a motor cartridge in about 15 minutes. That's a real number: timed it during a planned maintenance exercise.

One detail that surprised me: the standardized platform matters more than I'd expected. Because Interroll's EC500 and EC310 share common interfaces, we've reduced our spare parts inventory by roughly a third compared to when we used multiple brands. That's inventory carrying cost I wasn't planning for when we started—but now it's a line item in every annual budget review.

I don't have hard data on industry-wide failure rates, but based on our experience, I'd estimate the cost gap between a tier-one drive and a budget option becomes apparent somewhere around the 18-month mark.

But not every scenario is a win

I should be honest: Interroll isn't always the right call. In our system, there are low-criticality zones—like the infeed to a packaging station that's manual anyway—where we've installed a lower-cost option. The risk of failure there is minimal, and the replacement process is quick. In low-consequence applications, paying for the premium tier doesn't always make financial sense.

Also, while I'm impressed with their US support—our rep in Chicago is responsive—I've heard from colleagues in the APAC region that lead times can vary significantly depending on local stock levels. This isn't something I've experienced personally, but it's worth investigating if your operations are overseas.

Another thing I've learned: never assume compatibility. We tried integrating a competitor's conveyor section with an Interroll drive in 2023. It worked...sort of. The speed profiles didn't match well, and we had to add a separate controller. That was a $1,200 redo. Since then, our procurement policy requires 3 vendor quotes and a compatibility check before any mixed-brand system.

What was best practice in 2020—like assuming all 24V rollers were interchangeable—absolutely does not apply in 2025. The technology has evolved, and so has the product segmentation.

Part of me wishes we'd consolidated to a single brand earlier. Another part knows that having a benchmark—a 'control' vendor—gave us the data to justify our decisions to management. In the end, we use Interroll as our primary, with one alternative on standby for non-critical applications. That balance works for us.

If I could redo one thing, I'd track energy consumption more methodically from the start. Based on our rough estimates, the newer EC500 drives use maybe 15% less power than the previous generation—but we didn't have baseline data, so I can't give you a precise number. That's a gap I'm trying to fill in our 2025 audit cycle.