Walter Andrew Shewhart (pronounced like "shoe-heart", March 18, 1891 March 11, 1967) was an American physicist,

, engineer and statistician, sometimes known as the father of statistical quality control and also related to the Shewhart cycle. Walter Andrew Shewhart was born to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart on March 18, 1891, in New Canton, IL. Shewhart died on March 11, 1967, in Troy Hills, NJ. He attended the University of Illinois receiving bachelors and masters degrees. In 1914, he married Edna Hart and moved to California where he earned his doctoral degree in physics while studying as a Whiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1917. In 1918, Shewhart joined the inspection engineering department of the Western Electric Co. in Hawthorne, IL. Western Electric manufactured telephone hardware for Bell Telephone Co. Although no one could have realized it at the time, Shewhart would alter the course of industrial history. Shewhart's Contribution Engineers at Bell Telephone had been working to improve the reliability of their transmissions systems. Business dictated a need to reduce the frequency of failures and repairs to their amplifiers, connectors and other equipment that were buried underground. Bell Telephone had already realized that reducing variation in manufacturing processes would have a positive impact on repair costs. At the same time the company determined that continual adjustments in process parameters reacting to non-conformances resulted in increased variation and a degradation of quality.

Bell Telephones discoveries in product variation resulted in the institution of an inspection program, ensuring specification and quality standards to avoid sending defective products to customers. Even though this program was somewhat effective, it was very costly to deal with inspecting and sorting of finishedgoods. By 1924, Shewhart determined the problem of variability in terms of assignable cause and chance cause (Deming referred to this as common cause). On May 16, 1924, Shewhart prepared a memorandum of less than one page in length and forwarded it to his manager, George Edwards. About 1/3 of the page was devoted to a simple diagram that we would today recognize as a control chart. This memorandum set forth the essential principles and considerations that became known as process quality control. Early life and education Born in New Canton, Illinois to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart, he attended the University of Illinois before being awarded his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1917. The original notions of Total Quality Management and continuous improvement trace back to a former Bell Telephone employee named Walter Shewhart. One of W. Edwards Deming's teachers, he preached

the importance of adapting management processes to create profitable situations for both businesses and consumers, promoting the utilization of his own creation -- the SPC control chart. Dr. Shewhart believed that lack of information greatly hampered the efforts of control and management processes in a production environment. In order to aid a manager in making scientific, efficient, economical decisions, he developed Statistical Process Control methods. Many of the modern ideas regarding quality owe their inspirtation to Dr. Shewhart. He also developed the Shewhart Cycle Learning and Improvement cycle, combining both creative management thinking with statistical analysis. This cycle contains four continuous steps: Plan, Do, Study and Act. These steps (commonly refered to as the PDSA cycle), Shewhart believed, ultimately lead to total quality improvement. The cycle draws its structure from the notion that constant evaluation of management practices -- as well as the willingness of management to adopt and disregard unsupported ideas --are keys to the evolution of a successful enterprise.

Work on industrial quality Bell Telephones engineers had been working to improve the reliability of their transmission systems. Because amplifiers and other equipment had to be buried underground, there was a business need to reduce the frequency of failures and repairs. When Dr. Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company Inspection Engineering Department at the Hawthorne Works in 1918, industrial quality was limited to inspecting finished products and removing defective items. That all changed on May 16, 1924. Dr. Shewhart's boss, George D. Edwards, recalled: "Dr. Shewhart prepared a little memorandum only about a page in length. About a third of that page was given over to a simple diagram which we would all recognize today as a schematic control chart. That diagram, and the short text which preceded and followed it, set forth all of the essential principles and considerations which are involved in what we know today as process quality control."[1] Shewhart's work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality. Shewhart framed the problem in terms of assignable-cause and chance-cause variation and introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. Shewhart stressed that bringing a production process into a state of statistical control, where there is only chance-cause variation, and keeping it in control, is necessary to predict future output and to manage a process economically. Dr. Shewhart created the basis for the control chart and the concept of a state of statistical control by carefully designed experiments. While Dr. Shewhart drew from pure mathematical statistical theories, he understood data from physical processes never produce a "normal distribution curve" (a Gaussian distribution, also commonly referred to as a "bell curve"). He discovered that observed variation in manufacturing data did not always behave the same way as data in nature (Brownian motion of particles). Dr. Shewhart concluded that while every process displays variation, some processes display controlled variation that is natural to the process, while others display uncontrolled variation that is not present in the process causal system at all times.[2] Shewhart worked to advance the thinking at Bell Telephone Laboratories from their foundation in 1925 until his retirement in 1956, publishing a series of papers in the Bell System Technical Journal. His work was summarized in his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931).

Shewharts charts were adopted by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) in 1933 and advocated to improve production during World War II in American War Standards Z1.1-1941, Z1.2-1941 and Z1.3-1942. Walter A Shewhart, 1924, and the Hawthorne factory The year 1924at a factory in Cicero, Illinoissaw the start of two of the most important developments ever in managerial thinking. In May that year Walter Shewhart described the first control chart which launched statistical process control and quality improvement. In November of that year there began a series of research projects which came to be known as the Hawthorne studies. This body of work was central to the creation of the fields of the sociology, social psychology, and anthropology of the work place. Although these events occurred at the same place and in the same year, there has been remarkably little cross fertilization of ideas between them. Walter Andrew Shewhart (18911967) Walter Shewhart was born in New Canton, Illinois on 18 March 1891 to Anton and Esta Barney Shewhart. He received Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Illinois, then attended the University of California at Berkeley from which he was awarded a Doctorate in physics in 1917. He taught at both universities and went on to head the department of physics at Wisconsin Normal School at LaCrosse for a short period of time.1,2 In 1918 Shewhart joined the Western Electric Company to assist their engineers in improving the quality of telephone hardware. Western Electric produced hardware for the Bell Telephone Company, which became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). The Western Electric Company manufactured telephone equipment for them and since 1905 its major plant was the Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. The company and its factory grew rapidly with the need for telephones. By 1913 there were 14 000 employees and by 1930 there were 43 000.3 It was one of the largest manufacturing plants in the country. Shewart worked at Hawthorne until 1925 when he moved to the Bell Telephone Research Laboratories where he remained until his retirement in 1956. While at Hawthorne, Shewhart met and influenced W Edwards Deming who went on to champion Shewhart's methods.4,5 Joseph Juran also worked at Hawthorne from 1924 to 1941 and was influenced by Shewhart. Shewhart, Deming, and Juran are often considered to be the three founders of the quality improvement movement. Two of Shewhart's contributions continue to influence the daily work of qualitynamely, control charts and the PlanDoStudyAct (PDSA) cycle. Reducing variation: statistical process control The focus on reducing variation as a way to improve quality is a nonobvious contribution of quality management. When the ancients built their temples they needed squared stones that would fit together. If the door of a new car is too big, it will not close. If it is too small, the rain will come in. In a high quality car the doors and the frame match with precision. Today all customers would expect such a fit. By way of contrast, one of the most widely observed phenomena in population health is regional and small area variation in care. Medicine has only started down the road of reducing variation. Shewhart identified two categories of variation which he called assignablecause and chancecause variation. Others call the two categories specialcause and commoncause variation, respectively. He

devised the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. The various control charts that Shewhart proposed for variables and attributes include mean, range, np, p, c, and u charts.6,7,8 Shewhart reported that bringing a process into a state of statistical controlwhere there is only chancecause (commoncause) variationand keeping it in control was needed to reduce waste and improve quality. Shewhart is referred to as the father of statistical quality control.2 Shewhart's historical memorandum of 16 May 1924 proposed the use of the statistical control chart to his supervisors.2 In the preface to his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product9 Shewhart stated: The object of industry is to set up economic ways of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort. Through the use of the scientific method, extended to take account of modern statistical concepts, it has been found possible to set up limits within which the results of routine efforts must lie if they are to be economical. Deviations in the results of a routine process outside such limits indicate that the routine has broken down and will no longer be economical until the cause of trouble is removed. For over 50 years clinical laboratories have embraced Shewhart's ideas and incorporated statistical process control into standard operating procedures for clinical laboratory quality control10,11,12 and proficiency testing.13 More recently, other industries have rediscovered Shewhart's tools of statisical process control. Motorola developed the philosophy for quality improvement, based on statistical process control, which is called Six Sigma. Sigma is the Greek letter used to denote the standard deviation of a population. In 1988 Motorola won the US Baldrige National Quality Award and this brought the six sigma concept to public attention. Several other organizations started using six sigma, and General Electric, under Jack Welch's leadership, popularized the six sigma method. Sigma is a statistical unit of measurement that describes the distribution about the mean of any process or procedure. A process or procedure that can achieve plus or minus sixsigma capability can be expected to have a defect rate of no more than a few parts per million, even allowing for some shift in the mean. In statistical terms, this approaches zero defects.7 Shewhart cycle The Shewhart cycle or Shewhart learning and improvement cycle combines management thinking with statistical analysis. The constant evaluation of management policy and procedures leads to continuous improvement. This cycle has also been called the Deming cycle, the PlanDoCheckAct (PDCA) cycle, or the PlanDoStudyAct (PDSA) cycle. While Deming marketed the cycle to the massesa cycle which he called the Shewhart cyclemost people referred to it as the Deming cycle. The Shewhart cycle has the following four stages:

Plan: identify what can be improved and what change is needed Do: implement the design change Study: measure and analyse the process or outcome Act: if the results are not as hoped for Meaning The PDCA cycle[2] The steps in each successive PDCA cycle are[3][4]: PLAN

Establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver results in accordance with the expected output (the target or goals). By establishing output expectations, the completeness and accuracy of the specification is also a part of the targeted improvement. When possible start on a small scale to test possible effects. DO Implement the plan, execute the process, make the product. Collect data for charting and analysis in the following "CHECK" and "ACT" steps. CHECK Study the actual results (measured and collected in "DO" above) and compare against the expected results (targets or goals from the "PLAN") to ascertain any differences. Look for deviation in implementation from the plan and also look for the appropriateness and completeness of the plan to enable the execution, i.e., "Do". Charting data can make this much easier to see trends over several PDCA cycles and in order to convert the collected data into information. Information is what you need for the next step "ACT". ACT Request corrective actions on significant differences between actual and planned results. Analyze the differences to determine their root causes. Determine where to apply changes that will include improvement of the process or product. When a pass through these four steps does not result in the need to improve, the scope to which PDCA is applied may be refined to plan and improve with more detail in the next iteration of the cycle, or attention needs to be placed in a different stage of the process.

This cycle is used to make changes that lead to improvement in a manner of continuous quality improvement. This is a never ending process. After the easy low cost changes are made (the low hanging fruit harvested), the cycle process is repeated for another step, task, or process in the microsystem or system. After a period of time, other changes may result in the original process having an opportunity for improvement again. Shewhart published numerous articles, many of which were in the Bell System Technical Journal, and two books: Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product9 in 1931 and Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control14 in 1939 (reprinted in 1986). He was also the first editor of the John Wiley and Sons Mathematical Statistics Series, and he continued to serve in this capacity for more than 20 years. Shewhart served as a consultant in the War Department during World War II and the resultant American War Standards helped in the productivity efforts. Other consultancy work included working with the United Nations and the government of India. Among the awards that Shewhart received was the Holley Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and he was the first recipient of the Shewhart Medal by the American Society for Quality Control. He died on 11 March 1967 in Troy Hills, New Jersey at the age of 75. Reducing variation: statistical process control The focus on reducing variation as a way to improve quality is a nonobvious contribution of quality management. When the ancients built their temples they needed squared stones that would fit together. If the door of a new car is too big, it will not close. If it is too small, the rain will come in. In a high quality car the doors and the frame match with precision. Today all customers would expect such a fit. By way of contrast, one of the most widely observed phenomena in population health is regional and small area variation in care. Medicine has only started down the road of reducing variation.

Shewhart identified two categories of variation which he called assignablecause and chancecause variation. Others call the two categories specialcause and commoncause variation, respectively. He devised the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the two. The various control charts that Shewhart proposed for variables and attributes include mean, range, np, p, c, and u charts.6,7,8 Shewhart reported that bringing a process into a state of statistical controlwhere there is only chancecause (commoncause) variationand keeping it in control was needed to reduce waste and improve quality. Shewhart is referred to as the father of statistical quality control.2 Shewhart's historical memorandum of 16 May 1924 proposed the use of the statistical control chart to his supervisors.2 In the preface to his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product9 Shewhart stated: The object of industry is to set up economic ways of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort. Through the use of the scientific method, extended to take account of modern statistical concepts, it has been found possible to set up limits within which the results of routine efforts must lie if they are to be economical. Deviations in the results of a routine process outside such limits indicate that the routine has broken down and will no longer be economical until the cause of trouble is removed.

The Hawthorne studies In 1923 the National Research Council's Division of Engineering and Industrial Research established the Committee on the Relation of Quality and Quantity of Illumination to Efficiency in the Industries. The chair was none other than Thomas Edison. Previous reports from several companies showed that better lighting increased productivity.3 Western Electric was invited to carry out experiments to demonstrate this relationship. Starting in November 1924, the first study found no relationship between lighting and productivity. Later studies showed that productivity increased as lights were dimmed! This was followed by a series of experimental changes in working conditions for six women working in a separated assembly room. Thirteen sequential time periods were observed. Productivity rose over this time period apparently independently of the imposed changes. The conclusion was that the principal cause was that attention was paid to these workers. This unexpected result came to be known as the Hawthorne effect. This can be seen as a form of social placebo effect. From 1928 to 1933 Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger and others continued this work. One of their conclusions was the importance of the informal organization created by the workers themselves in defining the level of worker productivity. This large body of work is best summarized in Roethlisberger and Dickson's Management and the Worker.15 By 1933 the Great Depression had reduced the Hawthorne work force to 6000. Shewhart's work received worldwide attention but did not change the work at Hawthorne. Shewhart was a skilled theoretician, but could not successfully convey quality ideas to the manufacturing work force. By the time Juran left in 1941 you could walk through this plant, the seed bed of the quality revolution, without seeing any control charts.3 According to Juran: The priorities assigned to the production departments were to meet schedules and achieve high productivity. Quality was left to the inspection department.16 Western Electric and AT&T jointly founded the Bell Laboratories in 1925. It became one of the world's great industry based research laboratories. In 1947 William Shockley and others there invented the transistor which made our computer age possible.3 The first Western Electric plant to produce transistors was in Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the early 1950s quality control was a major problem there. Bonnie Small introduced Shewhart's methods and by the time she left Allentown there were 5000 control charts posted in the plant and performance had dramatically improved. She left the company effort to write The Western Electric Statistical Quality Control Handbook which first appeared in 1958. Building on these

efforts, AT&T's power systems division became the first US manufacturer to win Japan's Deming prize. Today, except for a few buildings, the Hawthorne plant is gone and has been replaced by a shopping mall where, no doubt, one can buy cell phones made in China. The events at Hawthorne in 1924 have changed the way managers see the world of work. Drawing on the Hawthorne studies and Shewart's statistical process control, the concepts of organizational behavior remain mostly unsynthesized, unmerged idea streams. The former have become the academic domain of social sciences and organizational behavior and the latter of engineering and production management. The former group of academics do not use mathematics with the enthusiasm that engineers do. These academic departmental boxes have delayed the synthesis of these ideas. This synthesis can happen in the work place by making the understanding of variation and its causes part of the common language of everyone. We pay attention to what we can and do measure. The choice of measures needs to be customer focused. Simply paying attention can create a Hawthorne effect. Creating a joyful transformation of the work environment may help align the goals of management in the formal organization with the informal organization of the workers. It is also worth remembering that technological change created Hawthorne and more such change did away with it. The central idea behind the Hawthorne effect is that changes in participants' behavior during the course of a study may be "related only to the special social situation and social treatment they received." The term was used as early as 1950 by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger.[1][2][3] French applied the term in reference to a set of studies begun in 1924 at the former Hawthorne (Cicero, Illinois) Works of the Western Electric Company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T The term gets its name from a factory called the Hawthorne Works,[4] where a series of experiments on factory workers was carried out between 1924 and 1932. This effect was observed for minute increases in illumination. In these lighting studies, light intensity was altered to examine its effect on worker productivity. Most industrial/occupational psychology and organizational behavior textbooks refer to the illumination studies[citation needed]. Only occasionally are the rest of the studies mentioned.[5] Evaluation of the Hawthorne effect continues in the present day.[6][7][8] Relay assembly experiments In one of the studies, experimenters chose two women as test subjects and asked them to choose four other workers to join the test group. Together the women worked in a separate room over the course of five years (19271932) assembling telephone relays. Output was measured mechanically by counting how many finished relays each worker dropped down a chute. This measuring began in secret two weeks before moving the women to an experiment room and continued throughout the study. In the experiment room, they had a supervisor who discussed changes with them and at times used their suggestions. Then the researchers spent five years measuring how different variables impacted the group's and individuals' productivity. Some of the variables were:

giving two 5-minute breaks (after a discussion with them on the best length of time), and then changing to two 10-minute breaks (not their preference). Productivity increased, but when they received six 5-minute rests, they disliked it and reduced output. providing food during the breaks

shortening the day by 30 minutes (output went up); shortening it more (output per hour went up, but overall output decreased); returning to the first condition (where output peaked).

Changing a variable usually increased productivity, even if the variable was just a change back to the original condition. However it is said that this is the natural process of the human being to adapt to the environment without knowing the objective of the experiment occurring. Researchers concluded that the workers worked harder because they thought that they were being monitored individually. Researchers hypothesized that choosing one's own coworkers, working as a group, being treated as special (as evidenced by working in a separate room), and having a sympathetic supervisor were the real reasons for the productivity increase. One interpretation, mainly due to Elton Mayo,[citation needed] was that "the six individuals became a team and the team gave itself wholeheartedly and spontaneously to cooperation in the experiment." (There was a second relay assembly test room study whose results were not as significant as the first experiment.) Bank wiring room experiments The purpose of the next study was to find out how payment incentives would affect productivity. The surprising result was that productivity actually decreased. Workers apparently had become suspicious that their productivity may have been boosted to justify firing some of the workers later on.[9] The study was conducted by Elton Mayo and W. Lloyd Warner between 1931 and 1932 on a group of fourteen men who put together telephone switching equipment. The researchers found that although the workers were paid according to individual productivity, productivity decreased because the men were afraid that the company would lower the base rate. Detailed observation between the men revealed the existence of informal groups or "cliques" within the formal groups. These cliques developed informal rules of behavior as well as mechanisms to enforce them. The cliques served to control group members and to manage bosses; when bosses asked questions, clique members gave the same responses, even if they were untrue. These results show that workers were more responsive to the social force of their peer groups than to the control and incentives of management. Interpretation and criticism H. McIlvaine Parsons argues that in the studies where subjects received feedback on their work rates, the results should be considered biased by the feedback compared to the manipulation studies. He also argues that the rest periods involved possible learning effects, and the fear that the workers had about the intent of the studies may have biased the results. Parsons defines the Hawthorne effect as "the confounding that occurs if experimenters fail to realise how the consequences of subjects' performance affect what subjects do" [i.e. learning effects, both permanent skill improvement and feedback-enabled adjustments to suit current goals]. His key argument is that in the studies where workers dropped their finished goods down chutes, the "girls" had access to the counters of their work rate.[10] It is possible that the illumination experiments were explained by a longitudinal learning effect. It is notable however that Parsons refuses to analyse the illumination experiments, on the grounds that they have not been properly published and so he cannot get at details, whereas he had extensive personal communication with Roethlisberger and Dickson.

But Mayo says it is to do with the fact that the workers felt better in the situation, because of the sympathy and interest of the observers. He does say that this experiment is about testing overall effect, not testing factors separately. He also discusses it not really as an experimenter effect but as a management effect: how management can make workers perform differently because they feel differently. A lot to do with feeling free, not feeling supervised but more in control as a group. The experimental manipulations were important in convincing the workers to feel this way: that conditions were really different. The experiment was repeated with similar effects on mica-splitting workers.[citation
needed]

Richard E. Clark and Brenda M. Sugrue (1991, p. 333) in a review of educational research say that uncontrolled novelty effects cause on average 30% of a standard deviation (SD) rise (i.e. 50%-63% score rise), which decays to small level after 8 weeks. In more detail: 50% of a SD for up to 4 weeks; 30% of SD for 58 weeks; and 20% of SD for > 8 weeks, (which is < 1% of the variance). Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan has described the Hawthorne effect as 'a glorified anecdote,' saying that 'once you have got the anecdote, you can throw away the data.'"[11] Harry Braverman points out in Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century that the Hawthorne tests were based on industrial psychology and were investigating whether workers' performance could be predicted by pre-hire testing. The Hawthorne study showed "that the performance of workers had little relation to ability and in fact often bore an inverse relation to test scores...". Braverman argues that the studies really showed that the workplace was not "a system of bureaucratic formal organisation on the Weberian model, nor a system of informal group relations, as in the interpretation of Mayo and his followers but rather a system of power, of class antagonisms". This discovery was a blow to those hoping to apply the behavioral sciences to manipulate workers in the interest of management.[12] The Hawthorne effect has been well established in the empirical literature beyond the original studies. The output ("dependent") variables were human work, and the educational effects can be expected to be similar (but it is not so obvious that medical effects would be). The experiments stand as a warning about simple experiments on human participants viewed as if they were only material systems. There is less certainty about the nature of the surprise factor, other than it certainly depended on the mental states of the participants: their knowledge, beliefs, etc. Research on the demand effect also suggests that people might take on pleasing the experimenter as a goal, at least if it does not conflict with any other motive,[13] but also, improving their performance by improving their skill will be dependent on getting feedback on their performance, and an experiment may give them this for the first time. So you often will not see any Hawthorne effectonly when it turns out that with the attention came either usable feedback or a change in motivation.