Genichi Taguchi - Contributions

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; and
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.