Robust design methodology: status in the Swedish manufacturing industry

While robust design methodology is a fairly common subject in the literature on quality and statistics, this paper shows that only 17% of Swedish manufacturing companies apply robust design methodology. The low level of use of robust design methodology is surprising since a majority of the companies think it is important to minimize performance variation. However, although knowledge and use of robust design methodology is poor, methods suitable in robust design methodology are often used. For example, 53% of the companies use design of experiments to some extent. The data presented in this paper were collected in a telephone survey of 105 companies in the Swedish manufacturing industry; the response rate was 83%. The sample was stratified with respect to company size, and it is shown that robust design methodology and related methods are used to a greater extent in large companies than in small and medium-sized ones.