ABSTRACT
Genichi Taguchi, who died in 2012, trained as a textile engineer prior to his service in the Japanese Navy. He subsequently worked in the Ministry of Public Health and Welfare and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. In that post he learned about experimental design techniques and orthogonal arrays. He began his consulting career whilst working at Nippon Telephone and Telegraph. His early work in the field of quality was mainly concerned with operational production processes – the shift to a focus on product and process design occurring during the 1980s. It was during this period that his ideas began to be adopted in the USA. Logothetis (1992: 17) describes Taguchi’s contribution as an ‘inspired evolution’ in the quality movement, by eliminating the need for mass inspection through his process of building quality into the product at the design stage. Taguchi (1986), cited by Pyzdek & Keller (2013), had a concern that ‘increased variance translates to poorer quality and higher cost’. Taguchi was awarded the Deming prize and the Deming award for literature on quality.
His best known work is Systems of Experimental Design (1987).
