Below are some of the points to justify the additional investment/cost while investing in the Ruggedized devices:
Total cost of ownership (TCO) - Company investing must take into account that the ruggedized devices have a strong and rugged build to take on the challenges of the field (high temperatures, accidental drops by engineers, exposure to water, high humidity and dusts) and there by the ruggedized devices easily last 3-5 years or longer in difficult environments - so any investment is spread over 3-5 years.
Ruggedized devices provide a TCO advantage because they have longer replacement cycles, and result in less breakdowns, less repair expenses as opposed to consumer grade devices that have much shorter replacements cycles most of them usually don't survive more than 6-9 months in industrial environments.
Higher replacement cycles of the consumer grade devices also means the devices are out for service more often, which means that during that period the services engineers don't have access to their devices have to record their work/transactions manually if the devices are being used for data capture/ work order management/ Field Service Management/ Proof of Delivery etc and delays the whole days schedule and delayed response to customers result in customer dissatisfaction - these are the soft costs that need to be considered before while making an investment into consumer/commercial grade devices as opposed to Industrial grade devices.
The 3-Year SLA (Service Level Agreement) / Service contract for the Tab-Ex® Series and Smart-Ex® Series covers all repair/ parts replacement and accidental physical damages to the device thereby protecting your investment and maintaining business continuity and drastically lowers downtimes due to failure of hardware.
So, in the long-term the investment in ruggedized devices spread over 3-5 years of its lifetime is much lower and of course not to mention the reduced downtimes which is a Return on Investment in itself.