A newly released study by the accounting and management consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP indicates that, while manufacturers are starting to set up World Wide Web sites, these companies will not start to use the Internet for real business purposes for another couple of years.

Michael A. Driessen, a management consulting partner with Grant Thornton, said that a total of 25 percent of all respondents to this year's survey said they had established commercial Internet sites, in comparison to just 14 percent a year ago.

The majority of these manufacturers -- 59 percent -- expect to have Web sites by the end of 1997, according to the analyst.

But most of the early manufacturers' Web sites are "home pages only," Newsbytes was told.

In fact, only 13 percent of the companies believe the Internet has had either "some" or "a great" impact on their businesses over the past two years.

On the other hand, about half of them expect to see these kinds of effects in the future.

The question is, "why are they waiting?". The answer, Driessen theorized, is related to the lag time between the introduction of new technologies, and their actual adoption.

Vendors today are either just introducing or still developing products such as digital certification, sophisticated product configurators, and selling chain technologies that will ultimately enable use of the Web for business purposes, the analyst pointed out.

In the end, many of the processes currently being conducted over EDI (electronic data interchange) will migrate to the Web, Driessen continued.

But for now, most financial transactions taking place over the Internet are limited to consumer-oriented goods like flowers, books, and music, the analyst concluded. Results of the survey are available on the Web at http://www.gm.com .

Source: Newsbytes