2017 Volume 25 Issue 3 Pages 41-50
Among the roles of quality engineering, Genichi Taguchi cited relieving society of the need to predict, diagnose, and decide. To see what such a society would be like, a study of its existing problems was made. Following the recession referred to as the collapse of the bubble in the early 1990s, the Japanese economy has been running in low gear, but despite that, Japan has some 26000 long-lived businesses that have been operating for at least 100 years. The present study focused on the continuity of long-running Japanese corporations that have survived the major social upheavals of the past 100 years or more, and used their financial data and other data to construct a unit space for application of the Mahalanobis-Taguchi system. This unit space was then used in a study of Japanese corporate performance that revealed features of individual corporations.
