Dr. Donald J. Wheeler has been one of Quality Digest’s most highly read authors for decades. His teaching on the use of control charts in industrial settings has long been considered the gold standard. He has conducted more than 1,100 seminars in 17 countries on six continents, and his books have been translated into five languages.

Now everyone can access Wheeler’s highly acclaimed “Understanding SPC” seminar for free. The seminar is available from SPC Press as a series of 15 sessions, each lasting about an hour. It covers the concepts and computations, the foundations and myths, and the many ways to use process behavior charts for continual improvement. The seminar illustrates how SPC is a way of thinking with some tools attached. And it is this way of thinking that brings the tools to life.

Special topics included

Three of Wheeler’s workshops are included in the class. The first two sessions cover his popular “Management Overview,” based on his best-selling book Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos.

The last three sessions cover Wheeler’s workshop on “Evaluating the Measurement Process.” This workshop presents a clear, correct, and easy way to get the most out of your current measurement systems and to understand any limitations they might present.

Highlights of Wheeler’s groundbreaking “Reducing Production Costs” workshop are contained in sessions 9 and 11. This approach lets you characterize the cost savings for various improvement actions.

Overall, whether you need a refresher or are starting from scratch, this seminar provides access to one of the world’s leading experts on how to get statistical process control to work for you. And it’s free!

Session contents, links, and other details are available at www.spcpress.com.

An interview with Dr. Wheeler

To further illuminate his career and delve into the basis for his seminars, Quality Digest sat down with Wheeler to ask more questions—and, more important, to get some more answers.

Quality Digest: When did you first learn about control charts?

Dr. Donald J. Wheeler: After grad school, my first job was in the statistics department at the University of Tennessee. The senior professor in this department was David Chambers, who was also a past president of the American Society for Quality Control (today’s ASQ). So of course, one of the classes they taught was a statistical quality control class (SQC) that was required for all industrial management majors in the school of business. Starting in spring 1971, I joined the rotation of teachers who taught this class.

After I taught the SQC class, Professor Chambers had me read Walter A. Shewhart’s Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931, Martino Fine Books, 2015 reprint). As we talked about SPC, he could tell I had not fully understood the subtleties of Shewhart’s approach. So he told me to read Shewhart again. Thus, by immersion and repetition, I learned SPC under Chambers’ guidance.

QD: Were many people even aware of SPC at the time?

DW: While more than 50,000 people took the War Production Board classes during WWII, and while this group formed the core of the American Society for Quality Control, formed in 1946, the use of SPC dropped off as new managers took over in the 1950s and ’60s. By 1970, the University of Tennessee was the only school in the country teaching SPC. This is according to McGraw-Hill, which published the only textbook in print at that time.

Then, in 1980, NBC produced the program If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? This was the beginning of the second wave of interest in SPC. People were clamoring for help, but the pool of experts on SPC was small, consisting mainly of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and his students from NYU, plus the statistics faculty at Tennessee and our students.

Chambers retired in 1981, and I resigned in 1982 to teach in industry. My colleagues and I had many spectacular successes with our clients, but we were too few to meet the demand. As a result, many people were taught SPC by those who did not understand how to create the fulcrum needed to leverage SPC correctly.

QD: When did you first meet Deming?

DW: I met him in Montreal in 1972, and I attended his lectures when he visited Tennessee in 1974. Later, I was able to “assist” him in his four-day seminars many times between 1981 and 1993. At the first of these classes, I realized that I was teaching the right stuff to the wrong audience. The college students didn’t appreciate SPC because they didn’t understand the problems of production. Participants at Deming’s seminars understood the problems, but lacked the answers SPC could provide.

This revelation changed the course of my life. The people I needed to be teaching were those who had problems to solve. So I resigned from the university in summer 1982 to become a traveling statistician. Since that time, I’ve taught SPC classes in 17 countries, in locations all over North America and Europe to the Caribbean, Malaysia, Brazil, and South Africa.

QD: What was it like when you first applied a control chart to a process?

DW: My first practical experience with SPC was at GM’s Inland Division. Inland made parts, and fabrication is where quality begins. At first, Chambers was teaching the classes while I followed up with the students as they used the charts. They would show me their charts and ask me what to do. I would swallow hard, then tell them to do what the chart indicated, which was usually to look for an assignable cause. Week after week, my clients hit home runs.

They made and documented huge savings, and these were accompanied by improved quality. This was a formula that had all the executives smiling.

I had never seen anything so simple work so well. I had taught the whole spectrum of statistical techniques, and had used them on various projects while I was at the university, but nothing ever worked as well as these simple charts. Process behavior charts exceed all expectations when they are used in real time in production.

An unexpected side effect of using the charts was the way they facilitate communication. Meetings didn’t last as long. People stopped passing the buck. I know of instances where the union backed up management decisions when those decisions were based on data from the charts. The charts allowed people to quit playing games and get down to work.

In short, the effective use of process behavior charts is transformative for both the individuals and the organization.

One day, after a review of a chart kept by an hourly worker, an engineer told me that worker had formerly been a troublemaker but now was one of the best workers in the plant!

Another day, a former student of mine called and said, “Since you came here I have had three promotions, and they were all a result of doing what you taught me to do. Now I have a budget, and you are coming back to train the rest of my people.”

QD: What got you started writing your books?

DW: In the early ’80s, the demand for SPC classes was so great that anyone who could spell SPC was teaching a class. However, as I noted earlier, the pool of expertise was quite small. In 1984, Fred Hruska at Ford said to me, “When you or David Chambers teaches SPC, it is a completely different class than when others teach SPC. You need to write a book.”

So, I started work on Understanding Statistical Process Control (SPC Press, third edition, 2010). As I wrote, I couldn’t separate what I had figured out on my own from what I had learned from Chambers over the years. So I called David and told him that he was the co-author, and assigned him specific topics and examples to write up. We then passed chapters back and forth as we worked on the book.

Finally, in January 1986, we went to press. With more than a hundred examples and exercises drawn from real life, this book was an instant success. Within a couple of years, Quality Progress listed it as one of the Top 10 books on quality.

Then, in 1990, Dow Chemical asked me to write a management overview of SPC. I developed the material they asked for and used that as the foundation for Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos. This little book continues to be even more popular than Understanding SPC. In fact, when Understanding Variation came out, Quality Digest printed a excerpt.

Now, after 12 books and more than 400 articles, 200 of which first appeared in Quality Digest, writing is my way of helping others to make sense of their data.

QD: What was it like to work with Deming?

DW: Deming could be unexpectedly direct, which was usually a good thing. One Sunday afternoon in 1991, our home phone rang, and Fran answered. Deming simply said, “Fran, I want you to publish Ceil’s book.” (This was a biography written by his secretary, Ceil Killian.) Fran said, “Yes sir,” and that’s how SPC Press came to publish The World of W. Edwards Deming, by Cecelia S. Kilian.

Ceil sent us materials to use in producing the biography. Among these was the chrysanthemum of the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure that Deming received from the emperor of Japan in 1960. I used this as the art for the dust jacket. Also among the materials Ceil sent, in contrast to the above, was a sealed tube that had never been opened. In it, I found Deming’s National Medal of Technology, awarded in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.

Later, in 1991, Deming and I were at a conference outside London. After supper, Deming asked me about a paper I had presented that day regarding the differences between theory and practice. After a few minutes he asked me to present this material at his NYU seminar for statisticians.

The following spring, my talk was scheduled at NYU for a Tuesday morning along with a related talk by Joseph Druecker. On Monday afternoon, Joe and I were sitting together as another statistician presented a purely theoretical approach to problems in production. As Deming relentlessly questioned the presenter, Joe slid down in his seat, muttering that Deming was going to crucify us in the morning. But I reassured Joe that he was safe. Deming was simply asking the questions he knew I was going to answer. He was laying the foundation for my talk by exposing the implicit assumptions behind the theoretical approach. And I was right. Both Joe and I had an easy time of it the next day.

Memorably, at one of Deming’s four-day classes in 1988, a participant came up to him and asked, “What do you think about [another quality leader, not named here]?” Deming replied, “I’ll not say anything against him. Use his techniques, and you will never run out of problems to solve.”