An application of Taguchi’s robust experimental design technique to improve service performance

Manufacturers in Europe, Japan, and the USA have widely employed the Taguchi methods of robust experimental design in optimizing product designs and manufacturing/assembly processes. However, these methods have made relatively little inroads into the service industries, for rather obscure reasons. Develops a robust experimental design to study the variabilities of a service process, namely, a customer complaint correction process, used by a small export company. The goal of the study is to reduce system response time to failures resulting from human or equipment error, equipment malfunction or damage, or unspecified abnormalities in the hardware or software modules of the system. Successfully identifies factors that affected the system response time in a statistically significant manner and yielded the optimum combination of factor levels that produce best results as measured in terms of system response time. Also demonstrates the usefulness and applicability of Taguchi methods in a service environment ‐ thus chipping away at the myth that Taguchi methods work only in a manufacturing environment.