Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma Definitions

Glossary terms, history, people and definitions about Lean and Six Sigma

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.

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