Practices of Robust Design Methodology in Practice

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a Design of Experiments (DoE) application in a company that works with Robust Design Management (RDM) reflects the principles and practices of RDM.The findings are based on an empirical study of a medium-sized Swedish enterprise that develops and manufactures consumer products for domestic use and actively uses RDM. The study is comprised of an analysis of internal company documents, semi-structured interviews and e-mail correspondence. The study reveals a gap between principles and tool use; a feasible tool is applied but in a suboptimal mode with a low contribution in terms of increased robustness. This gap could be bridged by practices that describe, on an activity-based level, what needs to be done in order to fulfil the principles