Quality was the watchword of the 1980s, and Genichi Taguchi was a leader in the growth of quality consciousness. One of Taguchi’s technical contributions to the field of quality control was a new approach to industrial experimentation. The purpose of the Taguchi method was to develop products that worked well in spite of natural variation in materials, operators, suppliers, and environmental change. This is robust engineering.

Much of the Taguchi method is traditional. His orthogonal arrays are two-level, three-level, and mixed-level fractional factorial designs. The unique aspects of his approach are the use of signal and noise factors, inner and outer arrays, and signal-to-noise ratios.

The goal of the Taguchi method is to find control factor settings that generate acceptable responses despite natural environmental and process variability. In each experiment, Taguchi’s design approach employs two designs called the inner and outer array. The Taguchi experiment is the cross product of these two arrays. The control factors, used to tweak the process, form the inner array. The noise factors, associated with process or environmental variability, form the outer array. Taguchi’s signal-to-noise ratios are functions of the observed responses over an outer array. The Taguchi designer supports all these features of the Taguchi method. You choose from inner and outer array designs, which use the traditional Taguchi orthogonal arrays, such as L4, L8, and L16.

The Taguchi designer in JMP supports signal and noise factors, inner and outer arrays, and signal-to-noise ratios as Taguchi specifies.