Article Spc1

Quality Progress/May 1996 65

T IS WELL KNOWN THAT DURING THE 1920S,

Walter Shewhart made significant contributions

to a scientific basis for economically

controlling the quality of manufactured

products. In 1931, he published Economic

Control of Quality of Manufactured Product, in

which he described many of the statistical tools he

developed and used during the previous decade.1

The content of that book is the foundation of what

is now called statistical process control (SPC).

Imagine an automobile design engineer from

the 1930s walking into a design laboratory in

1996, with the intention of putting in a day’s work.

After recovering from the shock of encountering

so much new equipment, new technology, new

materials, new manufacturing principles, much

greater vehicle complexity, and substantially

changed customer expectations, it would probably

take the engineer several years before he or she

could make significant contributions to the process

of designing a modern automobile.

Now imagine an industrial physicist from the

1930s magically transported to a physics laboratory

today. Again, even if the physicist successfully

adjusted to the vast physical differences between

the two labs, it would take years of education and

training to enable the person to make even the

most basic contributions to his or her new colleagues’

activities.

It is easy to envision similar scenarios in biology,

chemistry, communications, telecommunications,

atomic energy, or aeronautics; the differences

between state-of-the art expertise 65 years

ago and today is so remarkable that it is difficult to

imagine anyone making the intellectual transition

in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand,

if Shewhart were magically transported from his

job at Bell Labs in 1931 to any quality control

department in the world today, he might find his

first few days on the job a bit disconcerting and it

might take him a week to learn how to use his

computer...