It is a Fortune 100 company, and employs over 130,000 people. Currently, Lowe's is involved in a rapid expansion program, which involves the building of new stores throughout the country. As of Nov. 21, 2003, the Lowe's Corporation was opening on average one new store every 3 days. This rate of growth will only increase the value of the stock which is available to the public. Lowe's has been a publicly held company since October 10, 1961. The stock is available for public trading on the NYSE under the stock symbol LOW. Recent stock information shows the 52-week high at $60.42, while the 52-week low is $33.37. The home offices for Lowe's Companies are in Mooresville, NC. The bulk of our research was done at the Lowe's store #454 in Barboursville. We also collected some additional information and conducted research at the Lowe's store #588 in Logan, WV. .
The group decided to do our MIS 340 project on Lowe's Companies in part because two of the group members have worked there in the past. Jerry Porter is a former employee of the Lowe's store #588 in Logan, WV and Jeff Shuman is currently employed by Lowe's store #454 in Barboursville. With both a current and a former employee of Lowe's in our group, we felt this would give us an opportunity to reach out with these resources and gain knowledge about the company. .
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Research Objectives.
Our project attempted to study the database system used by individual Lowe's stores. Going in we had some assumptions about the type of database that the company would be using, so we wanted to dig deep and find out the types of information that was stored in the database. We were particularly interested in the role this system has in day-to-day operations, who has access to it, how it is updated and maintained, and the technology used to support the database. We also tried to take a broad perspective of the entire inventory management system to discover how the database contributes to the business process and the organization's productivity.
