Little did I know what I was getting into when, in the Summer of 1981 Alan Lasater, a colleague in the statistics department at the University of Tennessee asked several of us to join him in teaching the statistical methods of Dr. Walter A. Shewhart and Dr. W. Edwards to people who worked in industry….
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Sheets of glass are produced in a continuous process, then cut to size by “scoring” the glass and snapping the sheets apart. Scoring involves making a “mark” or “score” in the glass so that the pieces can be snapped apart with no rough edges. If the scoring is not done properly or the glass doesn’t…
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I never met Walter A Shewhart, but his insight of how to “see” process behavior through data is truly profound. W. Edwards Deming along with H. Alan Lasater and David S. Chambers of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville were instrumental in introducing me to the techniques Shewhart’s used to analyze process behavior. Through this experience…
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In the beginning, it seemed so easy. In the Spring of 1982 Jerry Fondren, the plant manager of Holley Carburetor in Water Valley, MS, and two other managers came to the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Productivity Through Quality. When asked why he came, he replied “Ford came to my plant and beat up on…
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