Andrew Calder

Background

About Andrew Calder

I have specialized in the analysis of demand and CPG promotion data for over 30 years, including the design and development of applications to perform such analysis and even to optimize promotion effectiveness. My career after Uni (Marketing major) started in 1988 as a consultant with Information Resources Inc, collecting and analysing "direct product profitability" data (using IRI's "Express" software) for certain categories of products sold through Woolworths (large Australian retailer), and also analysing shelf space data and configuring IRI's shelf space management software "Apollo". I moved to Frito-Lay (then Arnott's Snack Foods) in 1991, and built from scratch their Sales and Marketing Information System, in "Express", which was utilised and valued by all the sales and marketing professionals in the company. Simultaneously, I created a system to analyse retail sales and promotion data, which allowed the Sales team to analyse historical and planned promotion effectiveness and ROI (based on my own algorithms [regression/Loess] for modeling baseline and lift). In 1995 I moved to J&J Consumer, where I continued analysing promotion and advertising effectiveness and also helped implement a third-party promotion management system. I also conducted analysis of a Coles-driven initiative to modify trading terms based on shared benefits of using "Efficient Consumer Response" to drive purchasing behaviour (rather than traditional retail investment buying, which was costly to J&J in both promotion expense and the effect on the supply chain). From 1997 to 2016, I had Sales Consulting and Consulting roles with Oracle Corporation, initially using my Express skills (Express had been purchased by Oracle from IRI in 1995) and business understanding; and then from 2001 implementing Oracle demand planning applications, including Demantra since 2006 - which afforded me the opportunity to develop great demand planning solutions for clients in Australia (e.g. Qantas, Resmed, Cochlear) and all over the world (e.g. Pepsico Canada, Huawei in China, GE Healthcare in USA). With Demantra, I was able to use my experiences working for Frito-Lay and J&J in the 90's to further specialize in analyzing, configuring and “tuning” Demantra’s statistical forecast engine – an uncommon skill as it turned out. In 2016 I moved to AVATA (now under the Kalypso umbrella), where I have been exposed to the requirements, demand patterns and challenges of many new customers, and have mostly specialised in forecast engine tuning using Demantra, and more recently, Oracle DM Cloud in that time.