Search

Taguchi quality control method is a cost-effective experimental design technique for characterizing the optimal operating parameters for a manufacturing process. Most previous applications of the Taguchi method have been concerned with the optimization of a single-response process and a large amount of satisfactory implementation results have been published. However, for multi-response cases, an effective and user-friendly technique is still lacking. The multi-response technique presented in this paper modifies the traditional Taguchi method by adopting an empirical loss function to sum up the impact of each process variable. Compared with previous methods, this technique is distinguished in two aspects: (1) it theoretically optimizes the single-response case in a more accurate way; (2) it can optimize multi-response processes involving discrete and continuous data types. Considering a surface mount technology (SMT) process for a VGA card (a typical multi-response process involving six variables and nine responses), experiments applying the proposed technique were conducted and showed satisfactory results. The yield rate for the SMT process improved from 88% to 98%.