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Taguchi is a Japanese engineer. His notable contribution was the concept of 'Robust Design', the idea that design and production should strive to minimize variation. He proposed various tools to deal with this:

• the loss function, for calculating to cost of variation
• design of experiments, orthogonal arrays, outer arrays and linear graphs to analyses variation. Also the Signal to Noise Ratio.
• robust design, engineering products and processes to minimize variation through a three step process; system design, parameter design and tolerance design

Dr Taguchi is Executive Director of the American Supplier Institute.