Coca-Cola Amatil's group CIO is heading to Atlanta

Former Coca-Cola Amatil group chief information officer Barry Simpson is heading to Atlanta, after accepting a role as chief information officer for global operations IT services at the US-based Coca Cola Company.

Barry Simpson

A spokesperson for CCA confirmed Simpson's departure, first reported by CIO Australia.

“This appointment is clearly a strong endorsement for Barry and the world class results he and his team have been delivering for CCA,” the CCA spokesperson said.

Warwick Hutton will continue to lead IT for CCA’s Australian beverages business, reporting to the Australian beverages managing director, while group IT responsibilities will be managed by Mukesh Kapadia, who will report through to the CCA CFO.

CCA’s Australian beverages direct to consumer business unit, which was also previously managed by Barry Simpson, has been moved into the CCA’s Australian sales team.

According to his LinkedIn page, Simpson finished up at CCA in Sydney at the end of December, before taking up the Atlanta-based role at the start of January.

Coca-Cola Amatil holds the bottling rights to key Coca-Cola Brands in Australia and six Pacific countries, as well as being the parent company of SPC (whose brands include Ardmona, Goulburn Valley and IXL), and the Australian distributor for alcoholic beverages including Coors and Jim Beam.

Simpson first joined CCA as chief information officer in January 2008, having previously worked for around eight years at FMCG giant Colgate Palmolive.

One of Simpson’s key achievements at CCA was overseeing the deployment of a new technology platform called OAisys (One Amatil information system), based on SAP software.

The project, which allowed CCA to replace over 120 legacy systems, cost around $65 million and was built in collaboration with Coca-Cola Company.

OAisys was implemented as part of a broader corporate restructure program called Project Zero, which aimed to strip $100 million in costs out of the business over three years and reduce headcount by 260 (including around 70 jobs from IT).

Another major project overseen by Simpson was the migration of CCA’s Asia-Pacific customer planning and relationship management systems onto IBM’s Australian SoftLayer cloud.