Service-Oriented FMEA and Grey Relational Analysis Based Approach to Service Reliability Assessment

Abstract Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a systematic approach for identifying potential failures before they occur, with the intent to minimize the risk associated with them. It has been widely used in the various manufacturing industries as a solution to reliability problems. As the importance of the service sector is increasing, however, it has been recently extended to some applications in services. Despite these attempts, FMEA cannot be directly applied to the reliability problems in a service industry. Due to the heterogeneity and customer participation in service process, we cannot perfectly prevent service failures. For this reason, we suggest a new risk priority number with three input parameters that consist of severity, probability of occurrence, and recoverability. In this paper, we propose an approach for assessing service risk and service reliability using the service-oriented risk priority number (S-RPN). An example regarding a hypermarket service process is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.