Genichi Taguchi
Genichi Taguchi (January 1, 1924 – June 2, 2012) was the originator of the famed Taguchi Methods also known as Robust Design, which have profoundly influenced product development, engineering and the global quality movement.
Taguchi worked with quality pioneer W. Edwards Deming to help Japanese companies set the bar for quality and Japan’s post World War II ascent, to help transform Japan from also-ran to global leader. He authored more than 40 books and received numerous awards for his contributions to Quality Engineering.
His contributions included:
- Taguchi loss function – Used to measure financial loss to society resulting from poor quality
- 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.
- Innovations in the statistical design of experiments (DOE), notably the use of an outer array for factors that are uncontrollable in real life, but are systematically varied in the experiment.
Influences
- Matosaburo Masuyama
- W. Edwards Deming
- Ronald Fisher
- Walter Shewhart
- C. R. Rao
- John Tukey
Influenced
- Indian Statistical Institute
- Ken Miller
Links
- Wikipedia
- ASQ Honorary Member
- American Supplier Institute
- Genichi Taguchi Contribution: A/B Testing and Design of Experiments
Books
- Taguchi’s Quality Engineering Handbook
- Robust Engineering: Learn How to Boost Quality while Reducing Costs & Time to Market
- Taguchi Techniques for Quality Engineering: Loss Function, Orthogonal Expiriments, Parameter and Tolerance Design
Videos
Additional Resources
- A Brief History of Kaizen: The Key Players– creativesafetysupply.com
- The History of Six Sigma– lean-news.com
- What is Lean manufacturing?– iecieeechallenge.org
- Deming’s Contribution to Japan and Continual Improvement– blog.creativesafetysupply.com
- Implementing Six Sigma– hiplogic.com
- Understanding The Kaizen Philosophy– kaizen-news.com
- Failure to Explore Failure– jakegoeslean.com