Genichi Taguchi

Genichi Taguchi (田口 玄一, Taguchi Gen'ichi, January 1, 1924 – June 2, 2012) was an engineer and statistician.^[1] From the 1950s on, Taguchi developed a methodology for applying statistics to improve the quality of manufactured goods. Taguchi methods have been controversial among some conventional Western statisticians,^[2][3] but others have accepted many of the concepts introduced by him as valid extensions to the body of knowledge.

Biography

Taguchi was born and raised in the textile town of

In 1950, he joined the Electrical Communications Laboratory (ECL) of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation just as statistical quality control was beginning to become popular in Japan,^[4] under the influence of W. Edwards Deming and the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. ECL was engaged in a rivalry with Bell Labs to develop cross bar and telephone switching systems, and Taguchi spent his twelve years there developing methods for enhancing quality and reliability. Even at this point, he was beginning to consult widely in Japanese industry, with Toyota being an early adopter of his ideas.

During the 1950s, he collaborated widely and in 1954-1955 was visiting professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, where he worked with C. R. Rao, Ronald Fisher and Walter A. Shewhart.^[5] While working at the SQC Unit of ISI, he was introduced to the orthogonal arrays invented by C. R. Rao - a topic which was to be instrumental in enabling him to develop the foundation blocks of what is now known as Taguchi methods.

On completing his doctorate at

Since 1982, Genichi Taguchi has been an advisor to the Japanese Standards Institute and executive director of the American Supplier Institute, an international consulting organisation.^[8] His concepts pertaining to experimental design, the loss function, robust design, and the reduction of variation have influenced fields beyond product design and manufacturing, such as sales process engineering.^[9]

Contributions

Taguchi has made a very influential contribution to industrial statistics. Key elements of his quality philosophy include the following:

1. Taguchi loss function, used to measure financial loss to society resulting from poor quality;
2. The philosophy of off-line quality control, designing products and processes so that they are insensitive ("robust") to parameters outside the design engineer's control.
3. Innovations in the statistical design of experiments, notably the use of an outer array for factors that are uncontrollable in real life, but are systematically varied in the experiment.

Honours

• 1960 - Deming Prize for Individuals
• 1986 - Willard F. Rockwell Medal of the International Technology Institute
• 1989 -
  Indigo Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan
• 1990 - Honoured as a Quality Guru by the British Department of Trade and Industry
• 1995 - Honorary member of the Japanese Society of Quality Control
• 1996 - Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Directors (India)
• 1997 - Automotive Hall of Fame Inductee
• 1998 - Honorary member of the American Society for Quality^[4]
• 1998 - Honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• 1999 - Honorary president of the Robust Quality Engineering Society (Japan)

Book

• Genichi Taguchi (August 1992). Taguchi on Robust Technology Development: Bringing Quality Engineering Upstream. ASME Press.
  ISBN 978-0791800287
  .
• Genichi Taguchi; Subir Chowdhury; Shin Taguchi (October 1999). Robust Engineering: Learn How to Boost Quality while Reducing Costs & Time to Market. McGraw-Hill Professional.
  ISBN 978-0071347822
  .
• Genichi Taguchi; Subir Chowdhury; Yuin Wu (August 2000). The Mahalanobis-Taguchi System. McGraw Hill Professional.
  ISBN 978-0071362634
  .
• Genichi Taguchi; Rajesh Jugulum (2002). The Mahalanobis-Taguchi Strategy : A Pattern Technology System. John Wiley & Sons.
  ISBN 978-0471023333
  .
• Genichi Taguchi; Rajesh Jugulum; Shin Taguchi (2004). Computer-Based Robust Engineering: Essential For DFSS. Amer Society for Quality.
  ISBN 978-0873896221
  .
• Genichi Taguchi; Subir Chowdhury; Yuin Wu (2005). Taguchi's Quality Engineering Handbook. John Wiley.
  ISBN 978-0471413349
  .
• Taguchi, Genichi (1986). Introduction to Quality Engineering: Designing Quality into Products and Processes. Tokyo, Japan: Asian Productivity Organization.
  ISBN 978-928-3310846
  .