Genichi Taguchi and His Contribution To Quality Management: Prepared by Honchar Iryna

Genichi Taguchi and his
contribution to quality
management
PREPARED BY HONCHAR IRYNA

Early Life, Work, and Contributions
 Genichi Taguchi was born in Japan around 1924 and was a
student of textile engineering at Kiryu University till the
breakout of the second world war. This war was instrumental
in influencing the young man’s mind with respect to quality
post-production.
 Certain armaments in the Japanese Navy were notorious for
exploding post-production and Taguchi found himself right in
the middle of it during the war. He served in the Japanese
Navy during the second world war and worked with the
navigations department until the end of the war.
 After the war he found himself working at the public health
and welfare department where he was heavily influenced by
Matosaburo Masuyama, a famed statistician.
The manufacturing industry of Japan had very little
resources to work with after the war. Taguchi’s
work was centered around trying to reduce spiraling
costs and saving the industry. He realized that most
of the aberrations in cost were due to certain
external factors which he termed as noise in a
production was within parameters and tolerance
levels, the quality would decline owing to these
noises.” His idea to isolate these noises at the source
and reduce variations in quality is by far the most
important statistical work done in the field of
quality control.
Taguchi’s Contributions to Quality Control
 Genichi Taguchi’s additions to the field of quality control were not constrained to just the process
of production. He had keen insights into the perception of a customer towards a particular product
and how it varies with variabilities in quality as time passes. His equations to quantify and calculate
the same are famously called the Loss Function and is still used by manufacturing houses today.
Another major contribution of Taguchi was to

isolate and remove factors which affect the
variability of a product. These activities were
often ignored owing to the associated cost
and time needed. Taguchi’s brilliance lay in
the simplistic and cost-effective way he
designed arrays to isolate and remove these
factors.
 Reducing loss Taguchi was the first one to actually
quantify customer experience and define how it changed
with changes in product quality. These equations would
give insights into the loss in revenue and the relationship
it had with customer experience.
 Reducing product defects – In all production processes
there are factors which either influence product quality in
a direct or indirect manner. Though the direct influencers
are simple to catch and control, the challenge lay in doing
the same for the indirect variables. Even if it were
possible it would be a very expensive process and not
practical when scaled up. Taguchi came up with certain
arrays called orthogonal arrays which would pinpoint the
indirect variables and also keep costs under control.
 Variability: Can be quantified in monetary terms, the
variability of the operation of the product causes a loss to
the user.
 Product design: Quality is generated and the final cost of
the product is determined.
 Optimization of product design: A product can be
designed based on the non-linear part of its response, in
order to reduce its variability.
 Optimization of the process design: Variability is reduced
by means of the design of experiments, by selecting the
optimal levels of the variables involved in the manufacture
of the product.
 Quality Engineering: Taguchi also developed a
methodology that he called quality engineering, which is
divided into line and offline engineering.
Genichi Taguchi is a name which will forever be associated with
quality control. His pioneering thoughts and subsequent work
changed the field forever. His focus was into greater customer
satisfaction by looking into the loss of quality. He challenged the
prevalent ideas of production where it was okay if a defect was
within a tolerance limit. His methods famously known as the
Taguchi Methods have left a lasting imprint in the field of quality
control.

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Genichi Taguchi and his

PREPARED BY HONCHAR IRYNA

Another major contribution of Taguchi was to

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