ABSTRACT
Today most U.S. engineering organizations focus on system engineering design and system tolerance design to achieve their performance requirements. This often leads to excessive product manufacturing costs and product delivery-cycle times. By forcing the system tolerance design process to minimize or eliminate the performance parameter variability that can have a large negative impact on the system, operability and functionality, higher costs, and longer cycle times are inadvertently imposed upon manufacturing. The higher costs arise from added inspections and higher scrap, rework, and repair of the product, due to the establishment of tight design tolerances. The longer cycle times result from all the added manufacturing process steps that must be performed to deliver quality products. The proper use of Taguchi’s parameter design techniques to optimize performance while reducing sensitivity to noise factors is a preferred method that minimizes or eliminates the requirement for tight system design tolerancing.
