Control Charts monitoring Product's Loss to Society

Taguchi introduced a new philosophy in quality control that accounts for the economic loss associated to process variation measured by deviations from the target value of a product quality characteristic. The Taguchi loss function has been considered in the design of control charts only for the computation of costs associated with nonconformities. This paper considers sample statistics based on the Taguchi loss function as a means to implement Shewhart control charts monitoring both the deviation from the target and dispersion of normally distributed quality characteristics. The aim of this proposed control chart is to perform on-line quality control of a process by monitoring its quality loss cost performance over time. To compute the quality loss performance, we consider a nominal-the-best quality characteristic. The statistical performance of the proposed control charts has been evaluated and compared with that of widely used control charts. Implementing target costing philosophy by means of one of the proposed charts is also discussed. An example illustrates the Taguchi control chart in a practical implementation.