| by Laura Smith
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Imagine a case in which a certain company produces the same amount with half the workforce by improving work productivity. If the company keeps half of its employees idle, paying them the same amount in wages, its overall productivity does not increase. When all employees produce twice as much as before, and society needs the products, the company is said to have doubled its productivity. Otherwise, it causes other companies’ productivity to deteriorate. In sum, society’s overall productivity does not improve. This holds true when one country exports products to another country, causing the loss of many jobs in that country. If there is no need for quantity, increased productivity because of quantity leads to unemployment. Therefore, to improve productivity in the true sense, we should provide jobs to people unemployed as a result of productivity improvement. As companies develop new products, new jobs are created. While productivity improvement such as producing double the products with the same workforce results in partial realization, new jobs, producing new products and services, must also be available to workers newly unemployed. An entity focusing mainly on creating new products and services is a research and development department.
We could also have another type of productivity improvement: the creation of twice as valuable a product using the same number of workers. In this case, if our costs are doubled and we sell products at double the former price, the company’s productivity increases twofold. If every company could achieve this goal, all people’s incomes would double, they would buy doubly priced products, and as a consequence, the overall standard of living would double.”
--Excerpted from chapter 1 of Taguchi’s Quality Engineering Handbook
Apart from the long shadow his father casts in the quality engineering industry, Shin Taguchi has developed a successful career of his own. He has been teaching and coaching on Taguchi Methods since 1982, starting with the Ford Supplier Institute, which is now part of ASI. He holds a degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan, and has worked with the Quality Management Laboratory in Tokyo and the Indian Statistical Institute. He is now president of ASI Consulting Group LLC.
QD: How did Dr. Taguchi change quality assurance, engineering and product development?
Taguchi: In the early ‘80s, for 98 percent of U.S. corporations, “quality” meant the process of inspecting products for defects, or “firefighting.” Its objective wasn’t to solve quality problems, only to find them. Instead, Taguchi’s robust engineering focuses on proactive prevention.
QD: Where do you think the quality assurance/engineering movement is headed?
Taguchi: The goal for best-in-class companies is to design processes and products to be trouble-free, even when the concept contains new technology. This will lead to pure prevention. I see many companies that are getting very good at improving unoptimized design by firefighting and problem solving. This way they can reduce short-term quality costs, and it makes you look like you saved a lot of money. The question is, how many companies are really good at preventing reoccurrences of the same or similar problems? And moreover, how many of them are good at pure prevention by optimizing design?
QD: Are there companies or organizations that you think are doing an exceptional job at providing quality products and/or services?
Taguchi: Toyota Motor Co. is one of the best. It does a great job of pure prevention and reducing waste from the beginning of product development. Many Japanese companies such as Canon, Konica-Minolta, Ricoh, Fuji and Seiko Epson are also excellent. Not perfect, but very competitive. Also watch out for Hyundai Motors in Korea. Its chairman and chief technology officer are taking strong leadership positions to become a global competitor by making quality a strategy.
QD: What does Dr. Taguchi hope to see in the quality movement in the coming years?
Taguchi: Obviously, he likes to see good applications of robust engineering to prevent quality problems and the reduction of loss to society due to poor quality products and services. When you find a winning design concept, you have more opportunities for cost reduction because the design is robust to start with. |
It’s almost impossible to overemphasize the effect that Genichi Taguchi has had on the quality industry. His groundbreaking ideas about the role of noise and conformity in product development and engineering formed the basis for many of the management philosophies that have made Japan a world leader in production quality, innovation and design. During a career that’s lasted upward of 60 years, he’s shown hundreds of companies how to reduce costs and errors, and more important, how to error-proof their processes to make better products. The results of Taguchi’s labors are evident all over the world: in well-engineered cars, phone systems, aircraft engines, pharmaceuticals and much more, all produced by the quality processes he developed.
Like most engineers, Taguchi understood that all manufacturing processes are affected by outside influences, most often “noise”--that is, uncontrolled factors that cause variability. Taguchi was the first person to equate quality with cost. These realizations led to one of Taguchi’s best-known innovations, robust engineering (RE). Taguchi defined robustness as the ability of a process or product to work as intended regardless of uncontrollable outside influences. He developed ways to engineer robustness into products, allowing them to operate as intended in almost any circumstance.
“Robust design (including product and process design) generally means designing a product that can function properly under various conditions of use,” he writes in Taguchi’s Quality Engineering Handbook (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2005). “If this is its lone objective, we can study reliability or fraction nondefective, whose goal is 100 percent. Yet a corporation is merely a means of making a profit. Increased costs caused by excessive quality design leads to poor profitability and potentially bankruptcy. The true objective of design and production is to earn a corporate profit.”
Taguchi’s notable achievements are all the more remarkable given his position at the beginning of his career. Born on Jan. 1, 1924, in Takamachi, Japan, a city famous for the kimono industry, he studied textile engineering at the Kiryu Technical College in preparation to assume responsibility of his family’s kimono business. But after serving from 1942-1945 in the Astrological Department of the Japanese Navy’s Navigation Institute, Taguchi became interested in statistics.
After World War II, as Japanese manufacturers struggled to survive with very limited resources, Taguchi took a job with the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. There, he gained recognition for his industrial experiments into the production of penicillin. Early in his career, he also worked for the Japanese Ministry of Public Health and Welfare, where he conducted the country’s first study on health and nutrition; at Morinaga Pharmaceutical, where he applied his emerging quality improvement methodology; and at Morinaga Sieka, a candy maker, where he worked to reduce the melting properties of caramel at room temperature.
In 1950, Taguchi was hired by the Electrical Communication Laboratory, which was developing crossbar and telephone switching systems. Working on the project gave Taguchi plenty of opportunities for experimentation and data analysis. When the project was completed, the superior quality of ECL’s system--due in part to Taguchi’s rigorous quality studies--helped the company win a contract to provide the service for Nippon AT&T, a Japanese telephone service provider.
By the mid-1950s, Taguchi’s statistical prowess was starting to become known outside of Japan. He served as a visiting professor at the Indian Statistical Institute from 1954 to 1958, where he met Sir R.A. Fisher and Walter A. Shewhart, who would become major professional collaborators.
Taguchi earned his doctorate in science from Kyushu University in 1962 and subsequently made his first trip to the United States, where he became a visiting professor at Princeton University. There, he wrote a second edition of Design of Experiments for Engineers. After returning home to Japan, he joined the Japanese Standards Association’s research staff and founded the Quality Research Group, which met monthly to discuss industry trends and innovations. He also fine-tuned the methodology that was becoming known outside Japan as Taguchi Methods, a set of cost-saving, quality improvement practices that would innovate engineering and manufacturing worldwide.
Taguchi first consulted in the United States in the early 1980s. Among his first clients was Ford Motor Co., which had been struggling for years with poor quality and a resulting lack of consumer confidence in its products. Taguchi’s revolutionary redesign recommendations helped turn the company around. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Ford Taurus was one of the most popular cars on the road, says Subir Chowdhury, ASI Consulting Group LLC chairman and CEO, and frequent Taguchi collaborator. Major clients such as Bell Labs and Xerox Corp. quickly followed, and it wasn’t long before Taguchi Methods became part of the fabric of quality improvement and management in the United States.
“After companies saw what happened with [Ford, Xerox and Bell Labs], every-one was looking to Taguchi to help improve quality and get rid of engineering defects,” Chowdhury says.
While Taguchi’s robust engineering models improve quality, Chowdhury emphasizes that RE is about much more than “firefighting.” Taguchi has always striven to avoid producing errors in the first place.
“He’s most interested in preventive thinking,” Chowdhury says. “That’s his biggest contribution to industry. It’s not about trying to figure out why a certain design flaw is there; it’s about ensuring that it’s never produced. It’s about making things better the first time around. This is the revolutionary thinking of Dr. Taguchi.”
Chowdhury points to Korean automaker Hyundai as a prime example of Taguchi’s RE theory as it’s practiced in facilitating quality improvement. For years, Hyundai had been plagued with a reputation for poorly made cars. To turn things around, the company implemented a vigorous quality improvement program and RE. As a result, the Hyundai Sonata was named Consumer Reports’ Most Reliable Car for 2005.
Chowdhury remembered a conversation he had with Taguchi in which they discussed a car accident that was caused by the driver falling asleep at the wheel. “His response was, ‘Why didn’t they make the car so that it could drive itself if the driver fell asleep?’” Chowdhury recalls. “To him, the accident was the fault of the engineers and the car’s design. Now, he wants to design a car that will work well even if the driver was to fall asleep. The possibilities are really amazing.”
Over the years, Taguchi has written 40 books and earned many awards, includ-ing three Deming Prizes, the Willard F. Rockwell Medal for combining engineering and statistical methods (1986), the Blue Ribbon Award from the Emperor of Japan for his contribution to industry (1990) and the Shewhart Medal from the ASQC (1986). He was elected an honorary member of the ASQC in 1997, an honor bestowed only 16 other times in 50 years, and is the third Japanese to be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan.
Taguchi became the executive director of the American Supplier Institute Inc. in 1985. He now lives in Japan but still consults regularly in the United States. His most recent book, Taguchi’s Quality Engineering Handbook, is a nearly 1,700-page magnum opus of his impressive body of work. Co-authored by Chowdhury and Yuin Wu, it’s been hailed by quality gurus all over the world, many of whom have called it an instant classic for anyone interested in quality engineering. Taguchi’s son, Shin Taguchi, has become a quality luminary in his own right (see sidebar
on the following page) and helped to edit the book.
To celebrate the publication of Taguchi’s lifetime of achievement and the publication of the book, he will attend the World Congress on Quality and Improvement (formerly the Annual Quality Congress) in May, where he will be a featured guest of honor. The ASQ Automotive Division has approved the concept--in principle--to establish an award to honor him, as well.
At age 81, Taguchi has continued to innovate solutions to quality control challenges: His most recent innovation is a methodology called the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System, which is used to optimize diagnostic and pattern recognition systems in the service, education, health care and government industries. MTS has the potential of allowing doctors to predict which patients will develop serious illnesses years before they’re sick, and of allowing immigration officials to separate criminals and terrorists from tourists.
“Taguchi has never stopped thinking of how to make things better,” Chowdhury says. “I think that even 10 years from now, manufacturers will look back and be even more appreciative of everything he’s accomplished and taught. It’s really amazing, what he’s been able to do.”
Laura Smith is Quality Digest’s assistant editor.
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