Abstract
The Taguchi methodology which may be applied as off-line quality control in the product design stage or, as on-line quality control during production is presented. As an off-line quality improvement strategy, it is a preventive measure at the product or manufacturing systems design stage which has the capability of making the product design robust. As an on-line quality improvement strategy, it assists in diagnosing the cause of the variation during production for the purpose of either eliminating the cause of variation or redesigning the product/process to make the product robust against the effect of the variation. The results of a case study presented using a computer program developed show that the Taguchi methodology can lead to substantial improvements.
Highlights
To deliver competitive products, manufacturers must change their strategy from solving quality problerrfby inspecting products to designing quality into products
It has been realised by manufacturers thatabout 70% of product development cost is incurred at the conception development stage, and changes made in later stages very close to production affect only about 30%
The optimum performance value gives indication of the signal to noise ratio (SIN) which is an input to the Taguchi loss function (TLF)
Summary
Manufacturers must change their strategy from solving quality problerrfby inspecting products to designing quality into products. The result is excessive loss to manufacturers and high price by customers because they are paying for losses incurred throughout the product development stream. Quality culture has changed and manufacturers have realised that if they are to remain in business and compete effectively in the market place, they must begin to consider quality right from when the customer places order for a product to when the final product is delivered. Once the customer's voice has been captured using quality'deployment function, building quality into product has the effect of satisfying customer requirement at low price, and just in time. The program covers the design, analysis and loss function discussed in this paper Computerising such procedure enables manufacturers respond quickly to, and satisfy customer requirements. In the remaining part of this article, the term experiment refers to the procedure taken to optimise product and process design
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