Lowe's Mobile Rollout 60% Complete

By Adam Blair
Lowe's has deployed Apple iPhone-based mobile devices to more than 60% of its stores, with a chainwide rollout of all 42,000 devices to be completed by January 2012. However, the impact on associate productivity and the customer experience is already in motion: the retailer has identified opportunities to repurpose "several hundred thousand labor hours from support tasks to directly serving customers," according to EVP of store operations Rick Damron.

"The feedback from our stores on all of these upgrades has been highly positive for one simple reason: Associates feel they are better equipped to serve customers," said Damron during a recent conference call. The devices allow store associates to scan items, search for and track inventory, print price labels, display how-to videos and access the lowes.com site, all without leaving a customer's side.

"These improvements will free up time in the stores to serve more customers, and we're taking the opportunity to quickly review our existing store processes in order to eliminate unnecessary activities," said Damron. On average, each store has 25 devices, and associates are using them "instead of walking to a fixed terminal about 400 times per day, improving the customer experience and making our employees more productive," he noted.

One reason Lowe's has seen such a quick impact from this deployment is that the devices and applications are easy to understand and use. "Because the applications and operating platform are so intuitive, this is the first piece of technology we have deployed to the stores without training manuals," said Damron.

Saving 4 Hours Per Store Per Week

The retailer is also taking steps to make more efficient use of store managers' time, rolling out a labor scheduling system across its 1,700-plus U.S. and Canadian stores. "Store employees have responded very well to the enhanced visibility to their work schedules and to self-service features such as electronic time-off requests," noted Damron. "User-friendly screens and simple steps allow managers to accomplish the work more efficiently, so they can dedicate more time to customer-facing activities. Store management can now all learn and use one simple system instead of three antiquated ones."

In addition, by automating several previously manual tasks, Damron said early findings indicate the average store has reduced the time spent on scheduling and timekeeping tasks by four hours per week. "In addition, we are now able to provide weekly detailed payroll performance reports directly to the store and field management teams, which aligns their view of payroll performance and helps them identify efficiency opportunities," said Damron.

For related content: Lowe's Deploys 42,000 Mobile Devices to U.S. and Canada Stores

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