GENICHI TAGUCHI

• Genichi Taguchi was a Japanese engineer and statistician who

developed a methodology based on statistics that allowed to improve
the quality of the products manufactured for the time.

• His ideas are considered revolutionary industrially and business.

• Taguchi was born in Japan in 1924 and dies in 2012, at the age of 88.
He developed his studies and career in Japan. His methods are known
around the world.

• Initially, he served the Astronomical Department of the Navigation Institute of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the
Second World War.
• Later, he joined the Ministry of Public Health and Welfare and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics.
• It was here that he worked with the eminent Japanese statistician Matosaburo Masuyama and gained vital insights into
statistical analysis.
• His expertise in statistics garnered him an opportunity to work with reputed pharmaceutical company Morinaga Seika
and its sister company, Morinaga Pharmaceuticals.

• Taguchi then joined the Nippon Telegraph Electrical Communications Laboratory. Here, he was entrusted with the task of
enhancing the productivity of the Research and Development (R & D) department.

• To achieve this objective, Taguchi trained the engineers to improve productivity through effective and simple techniques.

• Initially, Taguchi visited many Japanese companies to study different operating procedures.

• He would later educate the engineers on what he had learned. Eventually, he developed his own techniques, and his visits
to companies helped him propagate his techniques.

• The main contributions of Taguchi revolved around the statistics applied to industrial processes of control and quality
management, as well as measures that came to influence the administrative mechanisms of Japanese and Western
companies.
 The loss function
• In 1970, Taguchi devised a new concept in quality called the Quality Loss Function.

• Taguchi defined quality loss, as “loss imparted by the product to society from the time the product is shipped.” The loss

factor encompasses two losses:

 Loss at the company end due to financial set-up, time, man-hours, productivity, rework, scrap, warranty cost,

equipment downtime cost and loss of customer trust.

 Loss at the customer end due to substandard product delivery, financial setbacks, distrust of customers, shared value

deprecation, wasted time and project delays.

• It was developed on the premise that the greater the variation of a value from the standard, the greater the costs

incurred. It suggests that organizations must settle for options that cost the least. Organizations should thus make

decisions after conducting a cost analysis and understanding all implications.

• It also suggests that the lowest cost decision is not always the best one for the organization. In its most basic form,

Taguchi Loss Functions shows us the cost to the firm when we deviate from the standard.
 Offline quality control

• Under this name Taguchi developed a series of techniques that would shield the productive process, and thus minimize
variations that could result in a decrease in the quality of the final product.

• The statistician conceived that the guarantee of a product of finished quality is in the stages of design and manufacture of
the product itself. He then developed a series of components that would generate a better productive yield: system design,
parameter identification and tolerance determination.

• System design :The design of the system consists simply in the conception of a product with the capacity to satisfy the
needs of the user; that is functional, stable and of the highest possible value for its expected price in the market.

• Identification of parameters :The parameter identification component is responsible for addressing all the variables
involved in the process that can influence the final product, and establishes the levels or parameters that will allow to
control the manifestation of these variables.

• Determination of tolerance :The determination of tolerance is, as its name implies, the assessment of the factors capable
of affecting the variations of the product and the levels of tolerance that it will have within the conditions established for its
production.
Design of Experiments
• Taguchi, who always worked with statistics and experimental functions, came to develop certain postulates for the
application of industrial experiments in production areas, establishing some reasons to justify their use and maximize
their effects.

• Some of these postulates relate to determining design parameters to reduce performance disruption to a minimum, to
reduce cost without affecting quality, to identify the influence of performance on value, and to determine the
characteristics of the product and the identification of its performance levels tolerance.

• One of the interesting ideas proposed by Taguchi in the development of his methodologies is to use an external
simulated environment which is supposed to mimic the environment the product will be required to perform in later
on. That way, random variance can be introduced in a controlled manner, allowing observers to identify exactly how it
impacts the work of an organization and to figure out what measures – if any – should be taken to fix issues with
variance.