Naresh Sharma’s Ph.D. research on predicting and reducing warranty costs will likely benefit many companies in the future. But for now, it has helped Sharma earn a historic degree. In July, Sharma became the 200th person to receive a Ph.D. from Missouri S&T’s engineering management and systems engineering department.

Sharma, PhD EMgt’08, successfully defended his dissertation, which defines a new method to predict product warranty costs early in a product’s development, on July 29.

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

The 200th Ph.D. comes 24 years after the engineering management department awarded its first Ph.D. to Madison Daily, PhD EMgt’84, who is now a professor emeritus in the department.

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