QUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, VOL. 5.
249-252 (1989)
Book Reviews
Taguchi Techniquesfor Quality Engineering, Philip J.
Ross, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988.
There is a considerable demand for a non-trivial uncom-
plicated text on Taguchi techniques. This text goes a long
way to meeting this demand.
The text is aimed at engineers and managers and thus
takes a hands-on approach to developing the required
expertise for designing and analysing experiments. The
readership is clearly identified as the statistically inexperi-
enced, thus the statistical details are kept to the essentials,
and then presented in a ‘this is how you do it’, rather
than a ‘this is why you do it’ style. Perversely this consti-
tutes both the strength and the weakness of this text. The
engineer, who is primarily motivated by application, will
find in this text much of what is needed. On the other
hand the statistician, who is primarily motivated by justi-
fication, will find this text unsatisfactory. Fortunately the
author recognizes this problem and is not slow in advocat-
ing that his readers should seek further training in statisti-
cal methods. If this advice is heeded, this text may well
constitute one of the best investments an individual motiv-
ated toward improving quality can make.
The first two chapters are devoted to explaining the
Taguchi philosophy. However, there are certain philo-
sophical difficulties in understanding Taguchi which this
text skirts around. As the author points out, Taguchi’s
philosophy is built on two tenets. The first is that the
reduction in variation of a product or process represents
a lower loss to society (in the Taguchi philosophy ‘loss to
society’ is the ultimate definition of quality.) The second
tenet is that a proper development strategy can be
designed to reduce either variation or the consequence of
variation.
One would have thought that the understanding of
these two tenets would be crucial to the understanding of
Taguchi techniques. The first is important because it lays
down a foundation, and proposes a measure useful for
quality management; the second because it is an apparent
consequence of the first and motivates us towards planning
for reduced variation. However, upon closer inspection
neither of these tenets is sustainable. Although it is
possible that ‘loss to society’ may have meaning within a
Japanese culture, it is extremely difficult to interpret what
its meaning is within a predominately Western or Euro-
pean culture. Western education is orientated to teaching
us the means whereby we can achieve individual goals.
This not only applies to individuals but also to companies.
We thrive against a background of competition, and ulti-
mately the survival of the fittest. It is clear that within this
scenario those individuals or companies that contribute to
society the most are not necessarily those that are
rewarded the most. The fittest is not that company that
contributes to society the most. Even if it were we have
no means of measuring that contribution; thus the concept
of ‘loss to society’ does not provide a general management
criterion.
The second tenet is interpreted as a cry for uniformity.
Now the virtue of uniformity is not that it results in high
quality, it is that with certain products and processes,
typically those associated with mass production methods,
it offers better control and reduced unit costs. Thus from
the perception of the customer, it offers improved value
for money. The area of quality addressed is that which is
traditionally referred to as ‘quality of conformance’. This
is a pity, because the efficacy of the Taguchi approach is
that it addresses the notion of robust design, which is a
design issue and not a conformance one. In the light of
these views I consider the section of this book that deals
with the philosophy of quality to be inadequate if not
wrong. In defence of the author this is not his fault, since
he gives a reasonably clear exposition of Taguchi’s views.
In my opinion one cannot espouse a philosophy by refer-
ence to contrived case studies which are in effect little
more than parables, and this seems to me what all Taguchi
advocates do in relating quality to loss to society.
Fortunately, this text comes into its own when it deals
with technique and method. However, this does mean
that the reader will have to reorientate his or her direction
from that of viewing Taguchi as an implementation of a
‘quality philosophy’ to that of understanding a powerful
statistical problem-solving technique. Even then, a trained
statistician will detect many errors, some obvious and
some subtle. For example, the usaal confusion between
significance, which is part of Fisher’s theory of statistical
testing, and confidence, which is part of the Neyman-
Pearson theory of estimation. Ultimately these are two
incommensurate theories, thus to treat them as being
reverse sides of the same coin, although unlikely to lead
to confusion at the level for which this text is aimed, is
bound to lead to confusion at more advanced levels.
Enough of the carping!! What is good about this book
is that it introduces and explains most of the ideas associ-
ated with the Taguchi methodology in a very clear way,
albeit using simplified examples. Thus all the components
of the Taguchi methodology are to be found, including
analysis of variance, orthogonal arrays, multi-level exper-
iments, interpretation of experimental results etc.
However, the author does not find it necessary to stick
to the ideas of Taguchi. What is apparent is that he has
been highly influenced by the work of Jack Diamond,
who builds up a design of experiment method based on
the use of Hadamard matrices. (Jack Diamond, although
not as well known as Taguchi, may turn out to be more
important to industrial experimentation in the longer
term).
An apparently novel concept, by which the author is
clearly impressed, is his notion of 0-way ANOVA.
Although he overclaims the novelty of this approach (it
has similarities with Gini’s mean difference coefficient),
what is undoubtedly new is the use to which he puts it by
bringing it into an analysis of variance framework. There
would be much advantage for the statistically sophisticated
to acquaint themselves with this novelty.
I can only reiterate my opinion that this is one of the
best introductions to design of experiments built around
Taguchi’s ideas currently available. Although it is clearly
aimed at the non-statistical engineer, even qualified statis-
ticians, while finding much to irritate, will also find many
ideas to stimulate.
L. N. HARRIS
Basic Reliability Engineering Analysis, R. D. Leitch,
Butterworths, 1988. Number of pages: 156.
This book is one of Butterworths’ BASIC series. The
series as a whole is designed to achieve two things, to
introduce computing mainly through the BASIC language,
and to introduce specific topics of importance within
engineering. However, I have reservations about introduc-
ing people to computing by such books. In the world of
engineering the BASIC language will be adequate for