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Lou Ann Lathrop is an ASQ fellow, ASQ board of directors’ treasurer for 2025, and past chair of ASQ Automotive Division. She also recently wrote an article for Quality about Dr. Deming's teachings.

Michelle: So, the article kind of talks about how you got introduced to Deming in the first place, but could you walk us through that a little bit more and explain how it happened?

Lou Ann: So, I graduated right when Dr. Deming was coming back to America to help American-country companies. I worked for General Motors and I was in quality engineering. That was the ‘84, ‘85, ‘86 timeframe and they were doing simulcasts. And that was before the internet. So, this was before email. And so, I don't know how they logistically did the video. They did a simulcast across General Motors and all the management people. I was at a plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Delco Electronics.

And so, he did this. I think it was four, thought it was five days, but I heard some people say it was four days of the teaching of Dr. Deming. You got a copy of his book, “Out of Crisis,” and he taught the whole time, and all his teachings made a lot of sense to me.

And being a new hire, relatively new in my career. In engineering school, there were really no quality courses at that time, or not a lot at the undergraduate level. And I knew nothing about statistics or management or manufacturing. I just didn't know. And so, what he taught made a lot of sense.

And after that, we were also put through what was called quality engineering one, two and three, which were a half a day a week. We were taught statistical process control. The first one was statistical control charting. So, it was over a year and a half, I think, or two that we went through these courses. So, we learned all about SPC.

You can't just learn it in an hour or something like that. And we had homework, and we had to practice, and we had projects. And then two was hypothesis testing and how to test the hypothesis. And then I think Q3 and Q4 got into all the design of experiments and it all made sense to me.

And so, I continued throughout my career to apply that methodology of looking at things. And I've always wanted to be a systems engineer. I had control theory in college. So that kind of made sense that you have to know the whole system in order to have an effect on change. And, so, yeah, so I really embraced Dr. Deming's teachings and continue to try to apply them.