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Peterson & Parvey

Figurę 3. Altemative C - Diyisional Taguchi Eiperts.

One corporate focal point for Taguchi methods resides within the R&D branch of the company and acts as a consultant for the entire organization. He is the author of a text on the subject of robust design and is nationally recognized as an expert on Taguchi methods. This person is not a full-time trainer, but is responsible for project support and development of new software applications using Taguchi methodologies. His work focuses entirely on DoE/Taguchi methods and he is not directly involved in other TQM training or activities. This company is ahead of most on the technical research and theoretic work with DoE/Taguchi techniques. They have a relatively long history of experience with the methods because they were one of the first companies to work directly with Dr. Taguchi in the early 1980 s.

Alternative D - Quality and Reliability Expertise

This large multi-divisional company has been extremely successful in applying DoE/Taguchi methods without specifically identifying intemal DoE experts. They have highly trained Quality and Reliability people (experts in Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Taguchi methods, and DoE) who are available to support projects and conduct any training that is needed, (see Figurę 4). Although they have been successful in pushing the use of the tools in manufacturing, they admit that this isn't the most effective way to integrate the concepts upstream in the development process.

The Quality and Reliability engineers are also considered to be the in-house statistical experts. Some employees have attended seminars at the American Supplier Institute, and extemal consultants have been contracted to