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Lowe’s Makes Self-Checkout Faster and Easier

How Lowe’s redesigned POS around how customers shop.

Summary

A redesigned POS brought a more intuitive digital experience into the physical store.

90 %

reduction in POS terminal start-up time

NAN
feature-image-story-lowes-point-of-sale-system

Client

Lowe’s

Industry

Retail

Topic

Experience transformation

Intro

For Lowe’s, self-checkout had to work with how customers actually shopped for home improvement products. Customers might purchase a few small items, bulky building materials or an entire project’s worth of supplies. A standard checkout experience wasn’t built for that kind of range.

Lowe’s set out to create a POS system that felt intuitive across different products, purchases and product needs. Publicis Sapient worked with the retailer to rethink the checkout experience for the physical store, applying modern digital design to make self-service easier to navigate while building a system that could work across thousands of checkout lanes.

The Problem

Lowe’s was limited by a restrictive, vendor black-boxed self-checkout solution that prevented them from implementing new features quickly, making it difficult for them to meet customer demand at checkout. The retailer wanted more flexibility to innovate and improve productivity with a system that would allow the business to roll out, measure, manage and monitor new features/devices quickly and at scale.

The Solution

For this transformation project, Publics Sapient had to start from scratch -- while also thinking outside the box (literally). This project was something other retailers had not done before, positioning us to create something truly one-of-a-kind.

Our collective teams built a custom end-to-end platform for Lowe’s self-checkout terminal and device management. The solution was built using IOT architecture, with state-of-art telemetry for data collection, device management and monitoring. The solution was also designed to give Lowe’s flexibility to scale, with a custom device interface and the ability for new features to quickly plug in to the platform for more control over customization.

The Impact

The solution was initially launched in three locations and is currently being rolled out to the rest of the Lowes Stores chain. Shoppers welcomed the new service, with positive feedback on how quick, easy, and efficient the new checkout process was for them to complete.

  • 90 percent reduction in POS terminal start-up time
  • Flexibility for both assisted and self-checkout lanes
  • Ability for Canary deployments (target a fix to a single register) with no business downtime
  • Centralized device management and operational dashboards
  • Lowered capital and operating investments with open-source technologies and commodity hardware
  • Improved store associates' productivity when handling customer requests

"

The vision was to build a simple, ubiquitous, and omnichannel self-checkout experience for our customers while abstracting all the technology excellence under a Platform. The goal was to build vendor agnostic, operationally efficient, and best-in-class product. All this with a platform and mindset to innovate! Sapient brought in their best talent and partnered with us through the inception, design, build, and PoC to productionizing the solution in a truly Agile manner. This partnership delivered immense value to Lowe’s and its customers within less than a year.

"

— Rajiv Raghunathan

Sr Director, Technology, Stores, Lowe's

Meet our authors

Kamalesh Loganathan

Senior Director Client Services

Rakesh Ravuri

Chief Technology Officer and 
Senior Vice President, Engineering

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