© 2006 Zovaya Corporation All rights reserved. Masters in Home Improvement, Lowe's Builds Up Its IT House with MicroStrategy Commentary by Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, which has grown from a single store in 1946 to a $19 billion retail empire, has aggressive technology goals for building its business and improving the bottom line. Steve Stone, vice president of MIS Operations at Lowe’s, said he is supporting these goals by employing best-of-breed solutions from MicroStrategy and NCR. The MicroStrategy implementation, called DART (Data Access and Reporting Tool), plays a key role in helping Lowe’s employees better understand what is going on at any given store location across the country. Regional managers, for instance, can quickly view sales and inventory trends at any store and make decisions on the fly that can add dollars to the bottom line. As a result of using the MicroStrategy platform, Lowe’s is realizing significant benefits (including high ROI) through improved merchandising decisions, more timely responses to information requests, cost reduction efforts, and enhanced employee productivity. Lowe’s deployed the MicroStrategy 7™ platform to anchor all of its query, reporting, and analysis applications. "MicroStrategy 7 is very critical to us as it provides the analysis functionality and security features needed to support our project plans in 2001," said Stone. Easy deployability, simple maintenance, and greater ease-of-use found in MicroStrategy 7 make it easier for Lowe’s IT support staff as well as its end users to use the technology. Lowe’s maintains a 16-terabyte data warehouse to track product inventories and sales at its more than 680 stores in 40 states. More than 500 users actively use MicroStrategy Web™, an all-HTML, intuitive interface, to build their own ad hoc queries or run predefined data reports. The MicroStrategy platform anchors the Lowe’s merchandising application, which reports on sales, margins, and inventory performance, and is the most widely deployed MicroStrategy-based application at the retail chain. Additionally, the MicroStrategy platform powers LowesLink, a private B2B exchange built for the Internet. LowesLink provides a Web-based environment to distribute a range of reports—inventory reports, requisition orders, and invoices—to the company’s suppliers, greatly reducing costs for all parties involved. Registering ROIs Several reasons influenced Stone to select MicroStrategy as the company’s primary business intelligence platform. "We were impressed with the breadth and understanding of MicroStrategy’s consultants, the company’s vision, and its ability to deliver complex analysis intuitively via the web," said Stone. "MicroStrategy’s platform offering is simply unrivaled in the business intelligence industry." If Stone is pleased with the solution roadmap MicroStrategy outlined for Lowe’s, he is ecstatic about the return on investment the query, reporting, and analysis environment has yielded. Lowe’s has begun generating direct-mail campaigns based on knowledge it has gained about its customers from MicroStrategy’s software. In one campaign earlier this year, which offered customers the chance to become a member of the Lowe’s Racing Team pit crew—the company sponsors NASCAR driver Mike Skinner—Lowe’s stores experienced an increased of sales large enough to generate an ROI of 1737 percent on the business intelligence solution. Stone says the company was also able to remove $63 million in slow-selling products from shelves based on BI analysis and, in the lawn and garden category, has been able to gain $7 million to $8 million in revenue by making better stocking decisions. In total, Stone estimates that more than $100 million in savings or revenue gains can be attributed to the business intelligence technology, and it’s still in its early days. "We believe we’ll be able to dramatically shorten the time from analyzing information to taking action," he says. "Ultimately, if you don’t take action with the information, it’s useless." Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5415 Company   |   Services   |   Partners   |   Clients   |   Career   |   Contact   |   Home © 2006 Zovaya Corporation. All rights reserved.