“Heading into spring, we anticipate being even better positioned than last year from a hiring perspective.”

In context

“University application. As I mentioned on our last call, we are also leveraging our new Lowe's University in-store training labs to provide the ongoing training that our associates need to build their skills and confidence so they can continue to progress in their career. Over the last 3 years, we have created valuable career opportunities for our associates with the incremental 10,000 department supervisor roles and 1,600 ASM positions that we have added. Since 2018, we have also invested well over $2 billion in incremental wage and equity programs for our frontline associates to ensure that we continue to offer a strong competitive wage and benefit package to our associates. I'm really pleased to report that our investments to position Lowe's as an employer of choice are paying off. Heading into spring, we anticipate being even better positioned than last year from a hiring perspective. And we are also confident that we will continue to drive productivity in our operations through our perpetual productivity improvement or PPI initiatives. As a reminder, this is not a single win. It is a series of improvements that are scaling across our stores over time. In fact, we are working on over 20 different PPI initiatives in our store operations this year. To highlight just a few key PPI initiatives, we have just launched a new store inventory management system, or SIMs across all of our stores. This platform gives store associates real-time visibility to inventory in their store. This includes inventory in the home bay location as well as product in the top stock and cap, off-shelf and back stock room. This new system will eliminate the countless nonproductive hours associa”