Barry Simpson, former group CIO of Coca-Cola Amatil (Asia Pacific bottling partner of Coca-Cola), has moved into a global CIO role at The Coca-Cola Company.
Simpson started as CIO, global operations, IT services this month and is based at the company's headquarters in Altanta in the United States. He was previously based in Sydney.
The Coca-Cola Company said in an internal announcement that Simpson will take responsibility for all of the company's business unit IT leaders - including North America IT and CPS IT - which were traditionally separate organisations.
"Barry will also take ownership of our primary business growth-oriented services including performance management, customer and commercial leadership, and franchise leadership," the company said.
"Pulling these roles and services together under one leader will allow us to synchronise and align a powerful set of resources that will position IT to best support the growth objectives of the company."
Coca-Cola Amatil said that its Australian CIO, Warwick Hutton, will continue to be responsible for IT across its beverage business. Group IT responsibilities are being managed by Mukesh Kapadia, GM, group IT governance, security and architecture. Kapadia has held this role since December.
Meanwhile, the Australian beverages 'direct to consumer' business unit, previously managed by Barry Simpson, has been moved in the Australian sales team, CCA said.
Simpson was CIO at Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) from 2008 until the end of 2015, having focused on cloud migration, business intelligence and digital media signage.
He worked with IBM to move CCA’s core systems to the cloud and streamline its order management and distribution processes across the South Pacific region. He moved its Asia Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems to IBM's pay-per-use cloud.
During his time with CCA, Simpson also arranged a partnership with Telstra to deploy 3000 digital signage units across Australia as a way to create more targeted content that encourages consumers to buy its products.
CCA manages more than 300,000 pieces of equipment, such as fridges and kiosks. Simpson collected point of sale data on this equipment, which is geo-tagged. Sales staff using iPads can view and interpret this data to gain insights.
Before joining CCA, Simpson worked at Colgate Palmolive from 2000 to 2008 as a VP of information technology.
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