AboutEric Hofer Expertise Over 27 years experience, with 17 in international FMCG in back office operations and in field sales and data collection, including design, development and deployment of Handhelds, Marketing Equipment (Service, Tracking and Return on Investment), reporting and Vending management. Have participated on the launch of operations in new markets, and re-engineered the back office in several countries.
Experience Designed and led the development and deployment internal ERP system for Pepsi used in On-Premise/Vending in 13 markets.
Designed 2 handheld systems, the latest is now deployed in 4 markets internationally.
Re-engineered the back office functions (settlements, despatch, invoicing, credit control, etc) for over 20 snack, confectionary and beverage operators.
Developing software: Progress, VB, Access, C, Sybase, SA
Organizations Innovative-Selling Solutions
Publications BudapestSun
Education/Credentials State University of New York - BA Economics
NYU - Courant - Graduate work - Computing
Past/Present clients PepsiAmericas
PepsiCola International
PepsiCola Company
British Steel
British Telecom
Britvic (Pepsi's bottler in the UK)
AT&T
BellSouth
Mars Overseas Bottling
Pepsi France
Matutano (Frito-Lay Spain)
Frito-Lay
Pepsi Foods International
Chase Manhattan Bank
Kidder Peabody
National Power
SmithKline Beecham
Mars Overseas Bottling (Pepsi Azerbaijan)
A&P Bottling (Pepsi Serbia & Montenegro)
Iberia Bottlers (Pepsi Georgia)
I am currently consulting for a small liquor start-up who
has gained a lot of traction in the southwest and is
currently being picked up by some of the major big box
retailers. My question is regarding software in the liquor
supplier and branding biz. I have been looking around for a
few weeks for a software package or database that can be
used to track and plan sales forecasts/inventory management
and marketing ROI.
My problem is we are projecting sales out for the next year
and need to plan how much inventory we may need/distributor
buys and retail account depletion. Also, I am looking for a
way to capture our marketing spend, analyze our marketing
programs and then start calculating an ROI to see which
marketing programs are more effective than others. Most of
the work will be done capturing this data and then analyzing
it myself, but is there any software that you know of that
can assist with these tasks? If all else fails I was going
to build my own database, but I need a data model to get
started. Any help in the right direction would be
appreciated as I see your experience is in data capture and
back office reporting.
Answer For In-Field staff related to order capture, marketing spend, Sales Development, etc., we're doing systems in this area and based over the internet.
For forecasting, there's a group out of Switzerland that can take your info and generate forecasts (used by Cibavision, so they have a lot of experience with complex SKUs). Drop me an email on e@a@h@o@f@e@r on g mail and I'll put you in touch.
