Jonathan Bowen

Jonathan Bowen is a Continuous Improvement Manager at GBMP.

Jonathan has more than 10  years of experience working in manufacturing and distribution for Amazon, Toyota, New Balance, Vecna Technologies, and ETM Manufacturing. Jonathan's interest in TPS began during his teenage years with his interest in cars and automobile manufacturing. He read books and articles describing how Toyota continued to dominate the auto industry quality measures, product development, and cost. His first experience inside a Toyota plant was in 2005 while taking a tour of the TMMK plant in Georgetown KY. From that time, Jonathan has been using the TPS philosophy to guide how he manages a process and a team of people.

While at Toyota, Jonathan developed numerous training modules. The training modules spanned from new employee training in TPS to TPM training for all production employees. In addition to running training courses, Jonathan also lead small and large scale kaizen events in the Jackson, TN casting plant. These events often lasted one week, with teams of 5-10 people. One of these events took a machine changeover from 48 hours to 28 minutes. Along with training courses and kaizen events, Jonathan was also responsible for training production employees on new products that the plant would be introducing. This entailed going to Japan for 1-2 weeks, learning from skilled trainers in Japan, and bringing back knowledge and skills to train the Jackson-based production workforce.

With the knowledge and skills Jonathan attained at Toyota, he has been able to work with different Massachusetts'-based manufacturing companies to instill the same management philosophy. Jonathan was Director of Manufacturing at Vecna Technologies. While at Vecna, he scaled the manufacturing group from 2 assemblers to a plant of 15 assemblers, manufacturing engineers, a quality department, and hardware support. The manufacturing group built, deployed, and provided 24-hour hardware support for over 6,000 check-in kiosks, servers, queuing displays, and digital signs as part of the nationwide deployment of hospital kiosks to all VA hospitals and clinics. In addition to the check-in kiosks, Jonathan also brought Vecna's autonomous robot from engineering into manufacturing while building a new team of assemblers and support functions for this product

Jonathan can be reached by email at JBowen@gbmp.org

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