Vice President of Purchasing

Our client is a family-owned group of manufacturing businesses serving the automotive and broader industrial markets. With multiple manufacturing operations in the United States, the organization provides an integrated range of capabilities spanning product design and development, engineering, tooling, advanced machining, injection molding, value-added assembly, and related manufacturing services. As a family-owned enterprise, the organization takes a long-term approach to its business, customers, suppliers, and employees.

Its culture values teamwork, accountability, innovation, continuous improvement, and a commitment to delivering high-quality results.

Our client is seeking a strategic, hands-on Vice President of Purchasing who brings an ownership mentality and thrives on turning opportunity into results. This executive will lead purchasing across multiple businesses, combining enterprise-level thinking with a willingness to stay close to the plants, programs, suppliers, and people who make things happen. The VP will leverage the organization’s collective buying power and supplier relationships to reduce total cost, strengthen quality and delivery, mitigate risk, and create greater value across the businesses.

This is an opportunity for a proven purchasing leader to make a meaningful impact—building upon a solid foundation while advancing a more integrated, disciplined, and forward-looking purchasing organization positioned for continued growth.

This position reports to the Chief Administrative Officer and has four (4) direct reports.

The VP of Purchasing must be a leader that’s not afraid of be in-the-trenches with broad functional expertise across strategic sourcing, supplier management and development, commodity management, contract negotiation, cost optimization and supply-chain risk, bringing the manufacturing depth and commercial acumen necessary to create value across complex engineered products, plastics and tooling environments.

• Develop and execute an enterprise-wide purchasing strategy aligned with the organization’s business, operational and financial objectives, while balancing the unique needs of individual businesses, manufacturing operations and customer programs.
• Leverage the collective buying power of the organization by identifying opportunities to consolidate spend, strengthen supplier relationships, standardize purchasing practices and create greater value across businesses and locations.
• Own strategic sourcing and major commercial decisions, providing executive leadership on supplier selection, negotiations, contracts, commodity strategies, and other significant procurement matters.
• Develop sourcing strategies that deliver the best total value by balancing cost, quality, delivery, technical capability, capacity, reliability, and continuity of supply—not simply lowest price.
• Stay close to the market and ahead of potential disruption, monitoring commodity trends, economic conditions, supplier capacity and other external factors to anticipate risk, protect supply and capitalize on opportunities.
• Build and maintain a high-performing supplier network, establishing clear expectations and disciplined processes for supplier selection, qualification, performance, and development while building strategic relationships with critical suppliers.
• Know the spend and know the numbers. Establish meaningful purchasing metrics and analytics that provide visibility into cost, supplier quality, delivery, sourcing performance, and risk, and use that information to drive decisions, accountability, and measurable improvement.
• Partner closely with Finance and operational leadership on purchasing objectives, budgets, forecasts, cost performance and…