Missouri S&T’s engineering management and systems engineering department
will award its 200th Ph.D. this summer to Naresh Sharma, whose research
explores the prediction of product warranty costs early in a product’s
development.

Sharma has developed a new approach to Dr. Genichi Taguchi’s quality loss
function, a mathematical formula that estimates the financial value of
customers’ increasing dissatisfaction as product performance decreases.
Sharma’s approach simplifies and increases consistency by combining Taguchi’s
three methodologies into one new function.

Sharma will defend his dissertation, “Predicting and Reducing Warranty Costs
by Considering Customer Expectation and Product Performance,” on July 29. “I
received lots of support and cooperation from S&T faculty and staff,
particularly from my advisor, Dr. Kenneth Ragsdell, engineering management and
systems engineering professor.”

Missouri S&T’s engineering management department awarded its first Ph.D.
to Dr. Madison Daily in 1984. Daily is a professor emeritus of Missouri
S&T, and is expected to be present for Sharma’s defense of his
dissertation.

“This is a significant milestone in the long and proud history of this
department, and it illustrates the excellent scholarly work that we do,” says
Dr. William Daughton, chair of the engineering and systems management
department.