In 2018, OEM Magazine published A New Era of HMI, a forward-looking piece that made substantive promises: HTML5-driven interfaces, IIoT connectivity, mobile monitoring, smarter diagnostics, and HMI design that could help close a growing skills gap on the plant floor.
All that technology exists today, but the question was never whether it would get built. It was whether the industry would build it into machines. The 2018 article caught the industry at an interesting inflection point.
One quote from the story framed the opportunity well at the time: “It's not the technology itself, but how you apply it, that will create competitive advantage,” said John Kowal of B&R Industrial Automation. Eight years later, that observation holds up. The platforms that pulled ahead were the ones that figured out how to apply open connectivity standards, not just support them.
As Director of Industry Development at Murr Elektronik and host of the Machine Builder Talk podcast, Colin Cartwright works with OEM machine builders across packaging on connectivity and machine architecture every day. His assessment is direct: "There are still a lot of machines out there without a PLC or HMI at all. And even where the capability exists, too many are still not properly connected into the wider Industry 4.0 and plant data infrastructure. That should be far more standard by now."
OEMs build what their customers ask for. When customers do not know what is possible or are not writing it into their specs, the incentive to design for it is limited. This is not a technology problem. It is an education and priorities problem on both sides of the transaction.
HMIs and machines must work together
For a long time, the HMI was the last thing designed but the first thing blamed. Screens were cluttered, navigation changed from machine to machine, and error messages sent operators to a binder manual. The hardware shipped, the software got finished later, and the operator figured it out.
What the industry was calling for in 2018 was an HMI that works the way modern software does: Layered, intuitive, context-aware, and accessible from multiple places. That capability is broadly available now at price points that no longer require a special conversation in the BOM (Bill of Materials). The barrier is not the hardware. It is the design philosophy that guides how the hardware is used.
Jeff Denson, CEO of FP Developments, puts it plainly. "Success came when we switched from trying to solve engineering problems to trying to solve business problems," he says. "It is just a totally different way of thinking."
That shift matters because recipe management, guided changeovers, operator prompts, and the HMI capabilities the industry has discussed for years are only possible because someone first decided to build a machine that can handle them. The HMI is the interface to a capability that must already exist in the machine. The conversation about smarter operator interfaces must start in mechanical and controls design, not at the touchscreen.
FP Developments recently partnered with Australian OEM Packserv to bring its modular, PLC-controlled capping and filling systems to the US market. Nathan Wardell, managing director of Packserv, describes the philosophy simply: "This isn't just about building another machine. It's about creating equipment that genuinely makes operators' lives easier while giving supervisors the insights they need to optimize production." The fact that a machine designed around that principle is finding its market in the US right now is not a coincidence.
Frank Skerl, Vice President of Sales at Hamrick Packaging Systems, was demonstrating exactly this at PACK EXPO. His company embeds preventative maintenance and changeover videos directly in the HMI. "We can add those videos and play them for customers so they can walk through a changeover right there on the machine," he says.
What these examples share is something Denson describes as the complexity behind simplicity. Making a machine genuinely simple to operate, easy to change over, and intuitive to troubleshoot requires more engineering work up front, not less. The machine that an operator can run confidently on day one did not get there by accident.
Cartwright makes the same point about machine design. "A machine can look modular from the outside and still be surprisingly rigid underneath," he says. Real modularity shows up in the control architecture, the connectivity approach, and the ease of future change. A machine that looks flexible in a proposal but requires a full engineering engagement every time a customer needs to run a new product is not modular in any meaningful sense. Neither is an HMI that cannot be updated or connected to the plant's broader data infrastructure without significant effort.
What has actually changed since 2018
A few things have shifted meaningfully, and not always in the direction the industry expected.
The vision in 2018 for mobile monitoring was for operators to run machines from tablets. What emerged, and what has proven genuinely useful, is mobile access for maintenance teams, FATs, and supplementary monitoring alongside the main HMI. Whether it be a technician walking a line during commissioning, a service engineer diagnosing a fault remotely or a plant manager checking output from across the facility, that is where mobile delivers real value. OEMs who design for those use cases are providing something their customers actually use.
AI-assisted programming tools are available now. Several automation platforms are shipping tools that help engineers build projects faster, generate structured logic, and reduce commissioning time. Rather than replacing the programmer, it is addressing the reality that skilled programmers are becoming as difficult to find as skilled operators, and compressing the time from concept to running machine has real business value.
The Unified Namespace is worth calling out specifically because it is the architecture the industry has been working toward for seamless integration from machine to cloud to enterprise systems. The concept is gaining real traction, and OEMs are increasingly being asked by end users to design machines that fit into a UNS-based data infrastructure, where information flows into a single, organized, real-time layer rather than siloed systems talking past each other. OEMs who understand it and design for it from the start are winning specifications that others are not even aware they are competing for.
Part of what sustains the adoption gap is a perception problem rooted in real experience. The dominant brands in industrial HMI have historically charged significant premiums for the capabilities the 2018 article described as the future: Data logging, alarming, historizing, MQTT, OPC UA connectivity, remote access, and database integration. Some vendors still charge licensing fees for remote viewing, require separate gateway hardware to enable IIoT connectivity, and layer subscription software costs on top of everything from data connectors to middleware. For OEMs and end users who have priced out those solutions, the assumption that smart, connected HMI capability is expensive is entirely rational.
It is also not universally true. Specialist HMI vendors focused on innovation rather than ecosystem lock-in have been offering these capabilities without the added cost baggage for years, with no need for additional cabinet space, gateway appliances, or subscription licensing to unlock what should be standard functionality. The product exists, the value is real, and most of the market simply does not know it yet.
The conversation hasn't changed. The cost of ignoring it has.
Reading the 2018 article again, the story has not changed much. The OEMs who treat the HMI as a strategic design decision, something thought about at the beginning of a project rather than bolted on at the end, are building machines that are easier to sell, easier to support, and more likely to stay in a customer's plant for the long haul.
In 2018, this publication described the HMI as the business card of the OEM and the face of the machine. Eight years later, that still feels right. The question is what yours says about you.
Nikki Gonzales is Director of Business Development at Weintek USA and co-founder of OT SCADA CON, a conference dedicated to operational technology, SCADA, and industrial cybersecurity. She is also the founder of Automation Ladies, a media platform and community dedicated to elevating diverse voices in industrial automation.
The Packaging Recycling Summit (PRS) is the premier U.S. conference for strengthening packaging circularity. In 2026, PRS is transforming into a fully immersive experience where attendees will solve problems, forge partnerships, and explore technologies that are reshaping packaging recovery. Directly connect with sustainable OEM’s at this highly coveted event.
