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Wine Industry Executive Profile: Carol thompson

NAPA – Carol Thompson recalls she didn’t know much about the wine business when she was approached to became chief operating officer of New Vine Logistics, one of the industry’s largest direct-to-consumer wine fulfillment houses.

Ms. Thompson, 52, quickly understood that her nearly three decades in solving transportation and logistics problems for multibillion-dollar companies in the energy, construction, agriculture and high-technology industries taught her much of what wineries need to move wine to consumers.

“There are tremendous opportunities here that are not exploited but are used in other industries,” she said.

For example, her seven years with petroleum company BP traveling the globe as vice president for retail fuel operations is helping her as the oil benchmark price is more than $120 a barrel, carriers are levying surcharges and some wine shoppers are shifting their purchases to fewer, larger orders to save on freight.

“We’re doing all we can to mitigate these effects and help our customers weather the storm,” she said.

Shipping cost surges plus economic uncertainty are part of what client wineries are indicating will be a slower year for wine sales, Ms. Thompson said. Yet wine consumption statistics plus the affinity of the newer generation to place orders online suggest to her this will be a momentary hiccup.

Ms. Thompson has been employing logistics strategies to help New Vine stay ahead of shipping cost increases and avoid tacking on fuel surcharges. One of the most beneficial practices in recent months has been “zone-skipping.”

Carriers charge for the number of geographical zones a package moves through, so New Vine has been striving to line-haul as many East Coast orders as is feasible to amalgamation warehouses, from which orders are delivered to nearby carrier hubs. In addition to shipping in temperature-controlled trucks, wineries can sometimes shave one to two days off delivery times to those consumers with this method.

In August 2007, New Vine founder and CEO Katie Hoertkorn brought in Ms.

Thompson, an associate from Ms. Hoertkorn’s days as an executive with DHL Worldwide Express before joining a dot-com predecessor to New Vine in 1999, to prepare the company to handle larger volumes of orders. Ms. Hoertkorn had a $30 million regulatory compliance software system and a 150,000-square-foot pick-and-pack warehouse in American Canyon, but she needed to prepare the staff accordingly.

Ms. Thompson’s challenge, not eagerly accepted at first, was to transition the work force from being great individual problem-solvers to being a team using shared solutions to winery ordering and shipping problems. A heightened emphasis on customer service, moving more ordering to electronic systems and providing clients more order information via secure Internet connections were good, but they needed to work when a given winery increased its orders 10-fold in a short time.

“Bad process trumps good people every time,” she said.

She had to learn quickly about rapid scaling in the early 1990s when Motorola couldn’t produce cellular phones fast enough to meet demand. The supply chain team found solutions by studying NASCAR pit crews, Fisher Price, Nintendo and Southwest Airlines.

Ms. Thompson rose through the ranks of supply-chain management and logistics by blooming where she was planted, in her words. Right out of high school, she went to work for Tenneco subsidiary J.I. Case, now called CNH Global, in her hometown of Racine, Wis., a southern suburb of Milwaukee. While studying marketing at the University of Wisconsin at night, she worked in finance, customer service and marketing, putting book learning into practice.

Nine positions and 15 years later, she had earned her master’s degree in international business and organization design and reached the executive level in transportation and logistics at Tenneco.

After Motorola she joined BP. In 2004 she left the company to return to her hometown to care for her ailing mother. CNH executives heard that Ms. Thompson returned to Racine and worked out a consulting arrangement for her as vice president of supply chain. That led to a one-year contract as vice president of global supply with San Jose-based high-tech contract manufacturer Sanmina-SCI before she joined New Vine.