by Albert Lin & Stacy Straczynski
With no background in procurement, Terrez Thompson was not an obvious choice to succeed Johnnie Booker as The Coca-Cola Company’s head of supplier diversity. But Thompson’s varied experiencesin Finance, Innovation and Operations, and Public Affairsworked in her favor.
“I’m not a supplier-diversity expert but I have a wealth of business experience,” she says. “As a result, I have been allowed to focus us on truly integrating supplier diversity in the business and being true partners to business and procurement leaders. “Ron [Lewis, Vice President of Procurement and Chief Procurement Officer] wanted to ensure the external and internal community that Coke takes supplier diversity seriously. There’s a community aspect and business imperatives that come with it. So it was a natural fit for me when they hired me.” Since succeeding Booker in April 2012, Thompson has focused on fully integrating the supplier diversity team across the supply chain of the organization, a task made more challenging by The Coca-Cola Company’s acquisition of Coca-Cola Enterprises (resulting in a new division, Coca-Cola Refreshments). This brought about the need to combine both companies’ processes and to ensure that the team covers the spend across a much larger organization. “With the merger, we now have a vast playing field of opportunity that will yield diverse suppliers across a broad spectrum,” Thompson says.
