VP of Operations, Sourcing Job Description

A vice president of operations, sourcing runs the machinery of buying production from other people's factories. Sourcing strategy decides which countries and vendors a fashion company will use; this role makes that network actually perform — orders placed correctly and on time, factory capacity booked and honoured, vendors compliant and audited, goods produced to schedule and moving through logistics to the warehouse. It is an execution role at executive altitude, measured not on the elegance of the vendor list but on whether thousands of orders, placed across time zones, arrive complete, compliant and on the ship date.

More Production Job Descriptions by Letter:

Running Order Flow Across the Vendor Network

The VP owns the operating calendar of sourcing: when orders are released to vendors relative to fabric readiness and sales deadlines, how capacity is reserved at key factories before prices are final, and how work in progress is tracked from purchase order to ex-factory date. Sourcing operations teams — the coordinators, production controllers and regional office staff who chase orders daily — report up through this role, and its systems discipline is their discipline: one version of every order's status, visible early enough to act on.

Exceptions are the daily material. A vendor falls behind on sewing, a port congests, a fabric shipment misses the cutting window: the operations VP decides the response — split the order, move it to a vendor with capacity, authorise air freight, renegotiate the delivery — weighing customer impact against cost with the commercial teams. Because the network spans countries, the role runs on structured communication: weekly vendor reviews, regional office reporting, and escalation rules that stop problems ageing quietly in an inbox on another continent.

Compliance, Capacity and Logistics Operations

Vendor compliance is operated, not merely declared, and it sits here: factory audit schedules, corrective-action follow-up, social and safety compliance monitoring, and the onboarding checks that must clear before a new factory receives its first order. The VP ensures audits actually happen, findings actually close, and vendors who fail repeatedly actually lose orders — the unglamorous enforcement that gives a sourcing code of conduct its meaning. Quality operations at vendor sites, including inspection bookings and inline monitoring, are typically coordinated through this function as well.

Logistics flow completes the brief: consolidation, freight booking, customs documentation readiness and the handoff to the company's distribution network. The operations VP owns the ex-factory-to-warehouse timeline and its cost, including the freight-mode decisions — sea against air — that late production constantly provokes. Vendor capacity management ties the whole role together: knowing, season ahead, how many units each approved factory can genuinely make, so the strategy team's plans are placed on capacity that exists.

Skills and Abilities the Role Requires

Operational command of the order lifecycle is the core skill: purchase orders, critical paths, WIP tracking, inspection and shipping, understood as one chain whose weakest link sets the delivery date. Systems fluency matters unusually here — PLM and vendor portals, order-tracking tools, data clean enough to manage by — because a network of dozens of factories cannot be run from memory or spreadsheets held together by habit.

The human range is wide: managing regional offices and agents across cultures and languages, holding vendor relationships firm enough to survive bad news delivered early, and staying precise under the seasonal pile-up when every order is urgent. Commercial judgement separates good operators from administrators — knowing when an air-freight bill is cheaper than a missed delivery, and when a vendor's promise should be believed. Fluency in the compliance landscape of apparel sourcing, from audit protocols to import rules, is expected at this level.

Qualifications, Training and Career Path

Careers here usually begin in sourcing coordination, production control or import operations, rising through sourcing management and regional office leadership to network-wide operations responsibility. Time spent in a sourcing country — inside a liaison office, an agent or a vendor's own operation — is the credential employers trust most, because order flow problems look different from the factory end of the chain. Education in supply chain, textiles or business supports the record; languages are a genuine asset across vendor regions.

The role leads upward to VP of sourcing, where strategy joins operations, or to broader supply-chain and chief operating roles in import-led businesses. It also stands as a destination in itself in large groups, where the sourcing network is big enough that running it well is a full executive mandate. Read beside the manufacturing operations role in this letter, it completes a pair: one VP operates the factories the company owns, this one operates the factories it buys from — and the skills, though cousins, are not interchangeable.