Genichi Taguchi Philosophy

Compiled and Presented by: Ms. Kumkum Bharti

Introduction

Taguchi viewed quality as an issue for the entire company and focused on the use of statistical methods to improve quality, particularly in the area of product design. Two of his concepts are particularly significant:

The loss function Design characteristics and Noise

He postulated the concept of a loss function, which measures the social cost of deviating from a target value. The loss= L=D2C Where D is the deviation from the target and c is the cost to society due to the deviation.

Introduction

His second contribution relates to the design of the products. He stated that there are two causes for variations in products: Design Characteristics and Noise NOISE arises due to variations in the operating environment and human errors which may be uncontrollable as well as controllable factors such as deterioration in the machine tools being used to produce the product.

Reducing noise can be done through

System Design: properly designing the product and the processes Parameter Design: identifying the key process variables that affect variation and then establishing levels for these parameters which will minimize the variation. Tolerance Design: identifying the components that contribute most to variations in the final product and then setting appropriate tolerances for these components.