What is Service Operations

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.