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1 During the development of a new clutch disc damping system and after three months of hard work the engineering team got stuck with unsatisfactory system performance (rattle noise), despite the help of a computer simulation software. The only alternative seemed to be using a more expensive damping concept but, besides the fact that there wasn't much development time left, that option would increase part cost by unacceptable US$ 200, plus development cost. The team then decided to try Taguchi's Robust Engineering optimization approach for the first time. In just two weeks the authors got a 4.6 dB gain on the signal-to-noise ratio. That allowed us to keep the initially proposed system, thus avoiding the cost increase. Besides, the authors were able to keep the development schedule on track.