Abstract
Service products are mostly produced and consumed simultaneously through interaction between customer and service providers. To prevent external failures in service operations, it is important to identify potential risks and take relevant actions to eliminate or reduce the occurrence. Therefore, risk assessment is vital to customer satisfaction in any service organization. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an effective and useful tool for risk assessment. Although FMEA has been extensively studied in the manufacturing literature, there are a limited number of studies considering the application of FMEA in the hospitality industry. In traditional FMEA, the risk priority of failure modes is determined by generating a crisp risk priority number (RPN). However, it has been claimed in the literature that crisp RPN doesn't have a good performance in reflecting real-life situations. To overcome this shortcoming, a fuzzy hybrid FMEA method is developed. The proposed method has been tested on a case study in a five-star hotel to assess its applicability and benefits.
TopIntroduction
Recently, market conditions have become more competitive as a result of the technological developments and globalization. Recently, consumers have wished to acquire goods and services of a high quality, low prices, and a more customized way. Under these circumstances, it is important to design and execute successful business processes in order to gain a competitive advantage. Business process improvement is a strategically important activity for every organization as well as hotel organizations. There are a number of business improvement tools and techniques used in process improvement activities. Some of the most commonly used techniques are: process mapping, process flowcharting, cause and effect diagrams, define; review; identify; verify; and execute (DRIVE), Pareto analysis, brainstorming charting, Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), etc.
There is always a vast amount of potential failure risk and effect for business processes. The risk assessment is a useful method for appropriately identifying and managing potential risks in order to carry out flawless business processes. FMEA is one of the most popular risk assessment tools, which is studied extensively in the literature. The purpose of the risk assessment is to identify potential failure risks and present possible solutions and consequences for them.
The service operations management is a complex task due to the nature of the service product. The intangibility of the service product and the customer participation in the production process are some of the critical issues about the service product delivery process. In addition, the service product is produced and consumed simultaneously, and it may be impossible to prevent poor quality issues before the service is delivered. Therefore, it is possible to say that maintaining high-quality in-service operations is a challenging task (Rotondaro & De Oliveira, 2001).
To improve the performance of service operations, it is important to analyze potential risks related to that process. By doing so, the potential risks and consequences can be identified. Therefore, risk assessment tools are significantly important for service companies to deliver service products in a high quality. The FMEA method is a well-known and suitable tool for the risk assessment. FMEA has been a popular method for the risk assessment in the manufacturing industry to maintain a reliable system. Nevertheless, preventing and dealing with failures is also very important for service companies.
This book chapter is organized as follows: Firstly, a literature review related to the FMEA method is presented. Secondly, under the main topic of this chapter, a brief information about the traditional FMEA method is given. Thirdly, the solution methodology, which contains the intuitionistic fuzzy (IF)-AHP and intuitionistic fuzzy (IF)-TOPSIS, is described. Fourthly, a case study is presented in order to illustrate the proposed method in a real-life problem. Finally, conclusions and future research ideas were discussed.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Multi-Criteria Decision Making: Decision-making methods that use a set of criteria to evaluate alternatives based on expert opinions.
Fuzzy Logic: A form of multi-valued logic obtained from the fuzzy set theory to deal with reasoning that is approximate rather than precise.
Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A structured approach to identify potential product or process failures.
Risk: The unexpected situations that can cause undesirable or negative consequences.
Risk Assessment: Evaluation of potential failure modes.
Service Operations: All the activities that are organized and performed to provide a service product.
Quality: Fitness for purpose or degree to meet customer requirements of a product or service.