What is Robust Quality Engineering(RQE)?

Companies and public organizations aim to develop and provide products and services that meet and exceed the needs and wants of customers and society. The variability of the products and services functions will lead to functional failures, defects, and quality problems, resulting in Loss to Society. Robust Quality Engineering (RQE, Robust Engineering, Taguchi Method) aims to minimize Loss to Society. Losses can be tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term, and direct or indirect. The content of Loss to Society can be:
・Cost and time spent by customers and users on repair, maintenance, and replacements.
・Customer/user dissatisfaction, discomfort, anxiety, injury, and loss of life.
・Waste of global resources.
・Loss due to pollution.
・Warranty and Recall (Short-term loss for producers)
・Decrease in repeat customers. (Long term loss for producers)
・Damage to corporate image. (Long term loss for producers)
・Low resale value.
・A decline in competitiveness and market share. (long-term loss for producers)
・Resource spent on generating warranty reports.

The quality of products and services is the loss to society after they are shipped to the market. The quality is evaluated in terms of the loss to society. The smaller the loss, the better the quality is.   

Since costs, in general, are largely labor costs, Genichi Taguchi states that our free time increases by reducing Loss to Society. RQE aims to minimize these social losses. The ultimate result is the sustainability of a company's competitiveness.
RQE focuses on "Robustness" as a strategy for preventing functional variability and minimizing defects and failures in products and services. A robust design is a design in which a product and service function is not affected by noise factors, such as the customer's operating environment or aging. Optimizing for “Robustness” minimizes functional variability, therefore, minimizes Loss to Society.