Success Story: Lowe’s Companies, Inc.

In 2007, Steve Stone, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Lowe’s Companies, was the recipient of MicroStrategy’s Individual Excellence in Business Intelligence award. Mr. Stone was recognized at MicroStrategy World 2007 in Las Vegas, NV.

Lowe’s is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world. As CIO, Mr. Stone provides the vision and leadership for developing and implementing information technology initiatives in alignment with Lowe’s business strategy. He has overall responsibility for the planning, delivery, and maintenance of cost-effective technology solutions needed to support Lowe’s various business groups. Lowe’s primary data warehouse contains more than 20 terabytes of data and has grown by more than 20 percent per year over the past few years.

Lowe’s BI environment contains industry-leading technology from MicroStrategy, Teradata, Informatica, and IBM. There are more than 30 full-time professionals and contractors dedicated to building a BI Center of Excellence at Lowe’s, with 25 reporting and analysis applications. The MicroStrategy implementation at Lowe’s, called DART (Data Access and Reporting Tool), provides employees greater insight into key performance metrics. More than 150,000 reports are run each week, and Lowe’s employees from multiple business areas use the data to manage inventory, improve margins, review market specificity, and identify sales opportunities. Lowe’s also uses BI to analyze demographic attribute data to better anticipate the products that its customers will buy.

“I am honored to receive MicroStrategy’s Individual Excellence award,” said Mr. Stone. “Lowe’s is committed to information-driven decision making. We have used decision support and data warehousing for more than 13 years and have invested heavily in improving our data warehouse and business intelligence programs. As a result of using the MicroStrategy platform, Lowe’s is realizing significant benefits through improved merchandising decisions, more timely responses to information requests, cost reduction initiatives, enhanced employee productivity, and better service to our customers.”

With fiscal year 2006 sales of $46.9 billion, Lowe’s Companies, Inc. is a FORT UNE® 50 company that serves approximately 13 million customers a week at more than 1,375 home improvement stores in 49 states. Based in Mooresville, NC, the 60-year-old company is the second-largest home improvement retailer in the world.