Genichi Taguchi: biography of this Japanese statistician

There are different personalities that throughout the 20th century contributed to creating a series of methodologies to optimize the management of companies. One of the most influential would be Genichi Taguchi.

We will dedicate these lines to learn more about the life of this important Japanese engineer through a biography of Genichi Taguchi, and we will delve into the method he created to help many corporations raise their efficiency to much higher levels.

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Brief Biography of Genichi Taguchi

Genichi Taguchi was born on the first day of the year 1924, in the Japanese city of Tokamachi, belonging to Niigata prefecture. It was a small population center whose main activity was the textile industry. Growing up in this place was surely an incentive for him to decide, once he completed his basic training, to go to university to train as a textile engineer.

These studies would be carried out at the Kiryu Technical College, at Gunma University. Genichi Taguchi's original plan was to acquire this training to be able to collaborate in his family's business, which consisted of a manufacture of kimonos, a traditional Japanese garment.

But an event occurred that somehow truncated these plans and diverted his career in another direction. It was the outbreak of World War II, and the involvement of his country, Japan, in that conflict. Therefore, in 1942, Genichi Taguchi He began to collaborate with the Imperial Japanese Navy, and more specifically with the Astronomical Department of the Institute of Navigation.

Once the war was over, it was another public body that required his services, in this case the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare. This fact was key to the development of his career, as it was here that he made contact with Motosaburo Masuyama, an eminence in the field of statistics, from whom he would receive a great influence.

Thanks to this collaboration, Genichi Taguchi he began to take an interest in statistical experimentation. During this time, he also provided his services to other public entities, such as the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and for private companies, such as the pharmaceutical company Morinaga, where he was able to carry out an investigation on the use of penicillin.

Development of your career

In the 1950s, Genichi Taguchi began a new stage, this time working for companies such as the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. Within this organism, developed its services in the Electrical Communications Laboratory. Throughout this period, the use of statistics in the service of quality controls began to be common, which further promoted the work of this author.

One of the great influencers in this area was the American engineer, William Edwards Deming. Institutions such as the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers also contributed to the use of statistics. One of the great tasks that Genichi Taguchi carried out throughout the years he spent in the Electrical Communications Laboratory, which were more than twelve, was to compete with Bell Labs, another leading company.

It was precisely throughout this decade that he developed some of the systems and methodologies for those that are known today, and that later would lead to the Taguchi method, which we will see more go ahead. Japanese industry, always at the forefront of improvement systems, was quick to welcome his new ideas. One of the most important companies that used this method was none other than the automobile Toyota.

Genichi Taguchi combined these tasks with collaborations at the teaching level at the Indian Institute of Statistics. It was at this school that he was able to come into contact with other personalities from his field. Some of those authors with whom he was related were Walter Andrew Shewhart, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, or Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao.

From this last author, he learned the system of orthogonal matrices that he created and that would form the core of the system that he would later develop and that his work would be more recognized by him. It is none other than the Taguchi method.

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Consolidation of his legacy in the business world

In 1962, Genichi Taguchi achieved the highest educational distinction, presenting his doctoral thesis at Kyushu University. He then terminated his employment relationship with the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. He collaborated with the celebrated mathematician John Tukey at the prestigious Princeton University. Through this contact, he also established relationships with Bell Labs, a competing company in its previous stage.

Shortly after, he managed to join the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, to teach engineering classes, a task that he would carry out for the next few years. During that time, he met the author Yuin Wu, with whom he worked for a time, before he moved to the United States. From there, he proposed to Genichi Taguchi that he make a trip to his institution to give a talk.

As a result of this visit, Taguchi returned to contact with the Bell Labs company, this time accompanied by Madhav Phadke, another personality from his field. This second phase of their collaboration was much more fruitful. The company became deeply interested in the methodology used by Genichi Taguchi to improve his processes.

This collaboration, and thanks to the fantastic reputation it had built throughout a successful career, was followed by many others in different multinationals, leaders in their respective sectors, which further favored the increase in popularity of this Author. Some of the companies with which he established agreements to implement his method were ITT, Boeing, Xerox, or Ford.

In the 1980s, Genichi Taguchi joined the Japanese Standards Institute as an advisor. It was not the only position of such importance that he held, as he was also named executive director of the American Supplier Institute. The versatility of his methodologies were key to helping a multitude of companies establish improvements in the area of ​​design. and they have set precedents for creating programs of another nature, such as sales process engineering.

Following his retirement, he continued to receive awards and recognition for a long career full of successes and hard work. Genichi Taguchi died in 2012, due to cardiorespiratory failure. He was 88 years old.

The Taguchi method

We have already mentioned previously that, if Genichi Taguchi was known for something, it was precisely because of the Taguchi method, which bears his name. Then we can learn more about this methodology. It is a statistical system, also called a robust design method, whose objective is to generate an increase in the quality of the products created. by a certain industry.

Initially, this methodology was applied to the manufacturing area, although its protocols have been adapted to be used in fields as diverse as marketing, advertising, biotechnology or engineering. The method developed by Genichi Taguchi has three fundamental contributions that are the basis for its success.

First of all, we would find specific loss functions, a system for evaluating the concept of losses in a much more efficient way, also taking into account the level of product quality required for a long useful life that has an impact on an increase in the brand's prestige.

Another principle of Genichi Taguchi's method is that of offline quality control. For this author, the best time to reduce or eliminate the variation in the quality of the products was precisely in the phase in which they were being designed and manufactured. Therefore, he devised the three-step system, consisting of system design, parameter or measurement design, and tolerance design, to achieve that goal.

The third key that Genichi Taguchi established were the innovations that he introduced in the design of experiments. It was at this point where he used the orthogonal matrices that he had previously learned and that allowed him to prepare the statistical method necessary to be able to prepare the designs that reported greater efficiency in your final results.

These are, broadly speaking, the pillars that underpin Genichi Taguchi's method or methods, with which he was able to help at the time to improve from him departments of some of the most important companies in the world at the time, thanks to which he developed a reputation for which we know him today in day.

His contribution to the world of statistics has been remarkable, and many later authors have collected part of his work to develop new methodologies that continue to help improve the efficiency of other Business.