Name: Jonathan K. Maples

Title: Vice President of Quality and Materials Management

Company: Visteon Corp.

Education: Bachelor's degree in history from Yale University and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Michigan.

Professional background: Maples is an auto industry veteran. Prior to signing on with Visteon two years ago, Maples was executive vice president of business services for auto supplier MSX International, responsible for that company's quality, supply chain, human capital and custom communication services. Prior to that, Maples was vice president of operations at DaimlerChrysler Corp. for more than 17 years, working in areas including operations, supplier management, procurement strategy and administration and sales and planning. From November 1997 to January 1999, he served as vice president of supplier management at DaimlerChrysler and launched the SCORE program, which resulted in significant savings for the automaker and its suppliers.

Current duties: Maples is responsible for improving quality at Visteon and building strong, collaborative partnerships with suppliers. "We need to continue to focus on improving material flow, reducing costs and helping to establish strong relationships with our suppliers," he says. "But we also have to keep working on improving quality so that we provide the highest quality products and systems to our customers."

On changes in purchasing: "The world of purchasing has migrated from an isolated function to a more highly integrated, cross-functional leadership effort in the management of procured services and material cost. This trend toward cross-functional collaboration has placed increased importance on communicating goal alignment, as well as defining business/user intent or requirements much more so than in the past. All of this requires a greater focus on speed, given the need to network effectively among different functions within the organization. The requirements of a purchasing professional today necessitate professionals who are more commercially savvy, possess a global awareness, and are astute in team building and overall collaboration among various functions. Today's purchasing professional is also getting more into program management and needs to be able to handle or coordinate cross-functional activities better than in the past. In addition to myself, Jim Orchard, our president of North America and Asia, is a former purchasing person."

On industry trends: "I would say the most important trends in purchasing today are early supplier involvement, employment of holistic cost thinking for evaluating the entire value stream, and management of waste elimination through the optimization of material design acquisition use/cost."

On technology: "I think one of the largest breakthroughs on the technology front for our activity has been online tools to help drive costs lower like reverse auctions. I don't believe many of the Internet tools out there have reached their full potential yet in both the public and the private markets. Also, supply chain management tools in the automotive industry have tremendous opportunity going forward for our profession."