Generally refers to Shewhart and Deming's work on letting a shop floor measure itself by sampling, and produce running charts of the statistical distribution of tool output. Better than batching the outputs, then letting outside specialists measure them after the links to the tools that produced them are lost.
See:
http://www.google.com/search?q=shewhart+deming
http://www.c2.com/cgi/fullSearch?search=feedback
SixSigma has real-life examples of SPC.