Industrial distributors are notoriously slow to adopt the latest in high-tech IT gadgetry, even when it might bring great savings or streamline their operations. Their thinking is that the new system will be hard to use, require lots of training and even call for a reorganization of their business.

They might be right.

If you're still relying on MS-DOS-based “green screen” IT systems from the 1970s, take heart—since the inception of the electric dynamo, businesses have been reluctant to bring new technologies on board. But history shows that once they did, productivity spiked.

That's the title of a 1990 paper by Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford, that showed a correlation between how long it took industry to adopt electricity and how long it would take modern-day businesses to join the computer revolution.

As financial columnist Tim Hartford writes in the online magazine Slate, electric light bulbs hit the market by 1879 and there were power plants in New York and London by 1881. But by 1900, there was still no sign of the “electricity revolution” in industry.

Manufacturers then used steam engines, linked to production lines, to power their factories. That meant the multi-storied buildings were designed around the central engine, with some machines placed closer to the steam engine (rather than located to facilitate the movement of product from one station to the next), Hartford explains.

That, in turn, meant scant productivity gains when electric dynamos replaced steam engines without a redesign of the production line.

People eventually realized that the dynamos meant factories could be designed around the flow of materials through a single factory floor. But Hartford says the most important benefit from the new technology was its compactness. “Each worker could have his or her own little electric motor, starting it or stopping it at will,” he writes.

And so productivity took a big leap in the 1920s—40 years after electricity became widely available to industry.

The lesson is that it takes time for new technology to have an economic impact.

Research from Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that the history of the dynamo is repeating itself:

“Companies do not do well if they spend a lot of money on IT projects unless they also radically reorganize to take advantage of the technology. The rewards of success are huge, but the chance of failure is high. That may explain why big IT projects so often fail, and why companies nevertheless keep trying to introduce them,” Hartford writes.

Distributors looking to ditch that old green screen should spend some time thinking not only about how the change will improve their businesses, but also about how they should change their businesses to take maximum advantage of the new technology. It might take a little more time, but history shows that in the end, it will be worth it.

If you've got a technological solution to a distribution problem, INDUSTRIAL DISTRIBUTION wants to know about it. E-mail your stories to brad.perriello@reedbusiness.com or call him at (781) 734-8234.