The Shewhart chart is named after Walter A. Shewhart (1891-1967), a physicist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, who introduced the method in 1924 and elaborated upon it in his book Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product, (1931). The concepts underlying the control chart are that the natural variability in any manufacturing process can be quantified with a set of control limits and that the variation exceeding these limits signals a change in the process.

In industry, the Shewhart chart is the most commonly applied statistical quality control method for studying the variation in output from a manufacturing process. Shewhart charts are typically used to distinguish variation due to special causes from variation due to common causes. Special causes, also referred to as assignable causes, are local, sporadic problems such as the failure of a particular machine or a mistakenly recorded measurement. Common causes are problems inherent in the manufacturing system as a whole. Examples of common causes are inadequate product design, inherited defective material, and excessive humidity.

When the special causes have been identified and eliminated, the process is said to be in statistical control. Once statistical control has been established, Shewhart charts can be used to monitor the process for the occurrence of future special causes and to measure and reduce the effects of common causes.

Deming (1982) emphasized that the improvement of a process can begin only after statistical control has been established. Deming also noted that control chart techniques are applicable to quality improvement in service industries as well as manufacturing industries.