Home
Case Studies
Lowe's
Modernizing processes and accelerating agile delivery are key drivers for businesses to continuously deliver value and remain competitive within the market. For Lowe’s (link resides outside of ibm.com), these factors became instrumental in its journey to achieve faster speed to market, stronger strategic alignment and increased team productivity.
Lowe’s is one of the largest home improvement retailers in the world. Founded in 1921, Lowe’s has grown from a single store in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, into an international enterprise with over 300,000 associates committed to helping homeowners, renters and professionals improve their homes and businesses.
In 2017, the IT leadership team at Lowe’s recognized changes were needed within the technology organization for the company to accelerate value creation and drive sustainable growth.
The IT leaders wanted to gain full control over everything that impacts the customer experience, including architecture, development and performance. They desired to get early feedback from the business and make real-time decisions, focusing on incremental, modular delivery. Leaders sought to change the way the organization managed delivery by moving away from measuring output and activity to measuring tangible value delivered instead.
“We wanted to own the experiences that matter, get faster at delivering value and operate with a value-driven focus,” said Kelley Wendelborn, Director, Technology Business Management at Lowe’s.
To accomplish these objectives, the organization needed to embrace an agile methodology. At the time, however, only a few engineering and delivery teams were following agile methods.
“Back then, it was a grassroots effort,” said Anita Selman, Senior Manager of Technology Business Management at Lowe’s. “But we were starting to look at product management and how our operational processes needed to change to support a product model, as well as agile delivery.”
According to Selman, the biggest catalyst for change was shifting how the company funded the tech organization. Historically, Lowe’s operated using a cost-center approach to manage technology spending. But this method created a siloed view of costs with no connection to business value.
“It was very hierarchical and focused on the ownership of departments or the ownership of pools of spend,” said Chris Ross, Senior Manager, Technology Finance at Lowe’s. “We really needed to understand the products we were investing in and the value those products delivered to the business.”
As Lowe’s pressed forward with its transformation, the leaders recognized the need for greater visibility into the company’s technology spend. They required an application that would enable them to manage the work of teams and align spending with strategic initiatives. To satisfy this need, Lowe’s implemented the IBM® Apptio® platform and IBM Targetprocess solution.
Lowe’s uses IBM Apptio to better understand its IT spend by combining financial and operational data into a unified cost model using an industry-standard taxonomy of cost categorization. The company uses IBM Targetprocess to dynamically manage work, resources and portfolios and keep them aligned with business strategy.
“We are highly leveraging Apptio to integrate a lot of information around our infrastructure, service desk, application development and more, and pulling that over into Targetprocess,” said Wendelborn.
A major capability of enterprise agile methodology is that it helps organizations shift from a project focus to product thinking. The combination of IBM Apptio and IBM Targetprocess has been a strong enabler for Lowe’s in its move to a product approach. By using this combination, Lowe’s has increased collaboration between finance and IT, simplified the forecasting process and provided holistic views of costs with connection to business value.
“We definitely don’t want a tool to drive our processes, but our previous tool prior to Targetprocess was very project heavy and project oriented,” said Wendelborn. “With Targetprocess, it’s team oriented. Even though we had shifted to products and teams, still having that old tool kept a little bit of an older mindset for a lot of people. Shifting to teams—and teams allocated to products—has helped in our journey.”
Faster speed to market
One of the most significant benefits to come out of this transformation has been Lowe’s ability to adjust quickly and deliver new capabilities based on changes in the marketplace. Unlike project-based funding, which can limit flexibility, product-based funding is more dynamic.
“Since we are funding things at a product perspective, reviewing things from a product perspective, we can increase speed to market,” said Ross. “For example, when COVID came around, we had to shift to a buy online, pick up in store model. Since we were funding stable teams and products, instead of being locked in by a project funding approach, it was easy for us to be dynamic, switch our priorities, and go that way.”
Greater team productivity and strategic alignment
According to Ross, the importance of productivity to Lowe’s can’t be understated. “Increasing productivity is massive,” he said. And the company uses Targetprocess in a number of ways to help the teams maximize it.
“Our technology teams capture time in Targetprocess,” Ross said. “We are then able to identify the task, the time spent on that task, and then aggregate the time and turn it into a capital value. And then we can work with our technology partners to identify what work has been completed.”
Ross added, “We have been able to optimize the alignment of our workforce by making sure they are working on the right products and simplifying how they enter time. That’s really increased their productivity. Making things easier for our developers and our technology partners really drives productivity.”
IBM Targetprocess has helped reduce administrative tasks. Teams can now maximize their time on work that’s meaningful to the company, which has been a tremendous benefit to Lowe’s. As Ross put it, “Letting tech do tech is a big benefit.”
Decreased legacy applications
With the shift to a product approach, supported by IBM Apptio and IBM Targetprocess, Lowe’s has been able to increase cost visibility, alignment of work with strategic initiatives and granular insight into tech spending. And this process has enabled them to eliminate some legacy applications, contributing to better margins for the company.
“Looking at things through a product lens has enabled us to rationalize applications and reduce our legacy application pool by 10%,” said Ross.
Next steps
The process of becoming more agile continues at Lowe’s with IBM Targetprocess. While the company has made tremendous progress in transforming its technology organization, the marketplace is continuously changing, and the company’s leaders are focused on ways to deliver more value to its customers every day.
Today, IBM Apptio and IBM Targetprocess continue to help Lowe’s pursue its goal of increasing value creation by supporting resource management, time management and product operations, as well as delivering cost transparency across the technology organization.
Lowe’s (link resides outside of ibm.com) is one of the largest home improvement retailers in the world. Founded in 1921, Lowe’s has grown from a single store in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, into an international enterprise with over 300,000 associates committed to helping homeowners, renters and professionals improve their homes and businesses.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2025. IBM, the IBM logo, and Apptio are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corp., in the U.S. and/or other countries.
Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.