As the world's largest processor of shareholder communications, ADP has the crucial responsibility of creating and distributing annual reports, proxy statements and related printed materials. The company's Edgewood, N.Y. facility handles more than 800 million pieces of mail each year and ships hundreds of pallets of critical documents each day.

To remain competitive, ADP needed to do away with its old paper-based, manual process of tracking pallets and workflow within its warehouse. Instead, the company required a system that would improve throughput and present customer service representatives with real-time order status information, as well as reduce labor costs.

That's just what ADP got with its new warehouse management system (WMS). "It supplies operating information to efficiently perform common warehouse management tasks, such as receiving, put-away, picking, shipping and cycle counting. And a special module provides full visibility to warehouse information in real time," says Cliff Heney, senior director of material and logistics.

For ADP, numbers speak volumes. Order fulfillment, the most time-intensive part of ADP's process, has been cut in half. In fact, within the first quarter of the system's installation, ADP increased throughput by 30% and achieved labor savings worth $150,000.

Meanwhile, the average number of pallets processed each week rose 43% and the time delivery trucks spent waiting on shipments dropped by 60%. Overall, the system has made ADP a much better supplier for its customers, says Heney.