Walter A. Shewhart
Walter A. Shewhart was an American physicist and Bell Labs engineer who introduced the control chart in a memo dated May 16, 1924, founding statistical process control.
What they did and why it matters
Shewhart gave managers a way to tell normal variation from real problems, which keeps warehouse teams from overreacting to noise in daily metrics. His control chart plots a measure over time with limits based on its natural variation, so only points outside the limits, or unusual patterns, call for investigation. He distinguished common causes from special causes, an idea W. Edwards Deming spread worldwide. A fulfillment operator charting daily mis-pick rates or dock-to-stock times can use control limits to decide when a change is a real signal worth chasing.
Related people
Sources
- Control chart (Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
- Walter A. Shewhart, Honorary Member (ASQ) asq.org