This presentation will introduce you to Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge. This is an interesting mix of the "hard side" such as statistical analysis and understanding systems, with the "soft side" of psychology and culture. We will discuss how Statistical Process Control interacts with Human Performance, Theory of Knowledge (how do I know what I know) with Operational Definitions and System Thinking.
Steve will relate personal stories, and stories from his mentors who worked with Dr. Deming, as well as his experience with Nuclear Safety and teaching college students about quality assurance. This will be a lively presentation, as Steve was known as the "passionate statistician" on Nuclear Sites, and is a great story teller. Come and participate in an ongoing Quality Story
Biography
Steve Prevette is an advocate of Dr. Deming’s management methods and applies Statistical Process Control to performance metrics. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, and also was an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer.
Steve currently teaches courses for Southern Illinois University at Carbondale for Information Technology. Courses include Statistics, R and Python programming, and Structured Query Language (SQL). He has been active with the American Society for Quality since 1996. His home is in Graniteville South Carolina, with his wife Jennie, two dogs, and the “train room.” Steve is a past chair of the Columbia Basin ASQ section and has maintained ties with the Section since moving to South Carolina in 2009, acting as its current webmaster.
He retired in 2021 from Fluor corporation’s “Government Group.” In his role, he supported nuclear sites in Ontario Canada, Ohio, South Carolina, and Idaho with statistical performance analyses. This included development and oversight of Statistical Process Control based Contractor Assurance and other performance metrics at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and Savannah River National Laboratory.
Steve started his career as a US Navy nuclear submarine officer. At the end of the Cold War, he left the Navy and was hired by Westinghouse Hanford as a Tank Farms Maintenance Supervisor. He was transferred to the desk job of running performance indicators in June of 1993 and has fulfilled that function for various Department of Energy contractors ever since.
Steve taught evening courses at the former City University campus in Richland and developed courses as an adjunct instructor for Aiken Technical College for Nuclear Quality Assurance. His statistics course has been popular with the students as it focuses on management use of data, including from a Deming and Statistical Process Control perspective.
Steve was published in Kalmbach’s “Great Model Railroads 2015” and frequently gives presentations on applications of statistics in the hobby of model railroading. A dozen people descend upon the “Burnt Hills and Big Flats Railroad” every three weeks to operate the model railroad as if it were a real railroad, complete with “timetable and train order” dispatching.
Burnt Hills and Big Flats Railroad Website: Burnt Hills and Big Flats Railroad An N Scale Model Railroad - Welcome (weebly.com)