Lowe's has several new BI projects under way, including one to identify fraudulently returned products. Stone said these initiatives all demonstrate the value that BI brings to the company.

Lowe's has also started using BI technology to track 50 million items in its 1,400 retail stores against billions of transactional records to plan inventory levels and analyze the effectiveness of the 4,000 to 6,000 quantity-discount programs Lowe's has in place at any one time, Stone said.

Overall, the company uses the BI tools to create 170,000 reports per week for internal users and for personnel at almost 1,000 of its suppliers, he said.

Paul Wolters, technology manager of BI at Kansas City, Mo.-based Hallmark Cards Inc., said the company uses MicroStrategy analytic tools for several critical applications, including one that provides data for automatically replenishing stock in its 460 stores.

Still, Wolters and his team must continue "prospecting" to highlight the value of BI to corporate managers, he said. Prospecting, Wolters said, means dispatching internal BI specialists to all areas of the business to proactively identify pain points in employee processes and come up with BI-based solutions to the problems.