In a perfect world, every company that operates multiple warehouses would run them like Staples does theirs. The $10.7 billion office superstore’s retail distribution center in the sleepy town of Killingly, Conn., for example, is typical of all four of Staples’ warehouses. It’s typical because five years ago Framingham, Mass.-based Staples standardized on a single warehouse management system (WMS) from EXE Technologies that integrates with the rest of the company’s operational systems.

Inside the 307,060-square-foot Killingly warehouse, forklifts, palette jacks and clamp trucks weave through aisles of metal shelving. Turret trucks, guided by sensors in the concrete floor, heft wooden pallets stacked with boxes by the dozen and, instructed by the company’s inventory management system, deposit them in exactly the right spot on the shelves. One and a half miles of conveyor belt grinds along a serpentine path bearing cardboard boxes of everything from binders and three-hole punches to lamps and file cabinets. Women in jeans, T-shirts and sneakers scan pick tickets with laser guns, which instantly populate LED screens on the long, multilevel metal racks before them with numbers that indicate the quantities of PDAs, boxes of pens, mobile phones and toner cartridges they need to pick. The entire operation runs 24 hours a day without a hitch from Sunday to Saturday?shutting down for about six hours every Sunday morning.

The benefits that Staples gains from working on a single platform are many splendored. Running just one WMS enables the company to establish consistent procedures for distributing merchandise to stores, transfer products from one distribution center to another and have a dynamic, enterprisewide view of its inventory. Jeff Klingensmith, Staples’ vice president of retail distribution operations, says that while it’s hard to put an exact figure on the money his company saves, "I see savings in licensing, maintenance agreements and in the [cost of] custom configuration of base [WMS] code."

Ah, if only every business was born fully integrated, with warehouses and corporate headquarters and factory floors feeding into ERP systems, providing perfect, seamless visibility at every point in the supply chain. Then all a CIO would have to do is tilt his chair back, put his feet up and dream up ways to turn his company’s IT into revenue streams while delegating to some systems operator the task of making sure that the conveyor belts of data are running smoothly.

But life, as we know, is not like that.

Living In the Real, (Dis)Integrated World