A systematic approach for diagnosing service failure: Service-specific FMEA and grey relational analysis approach

In any organization, the importance of failure management cannot be mentioned by a single word. However, most failure analysis is dominated by the manufacturing sector, despite the increasing importance of the service sector. In response, this paper proposes a systematic approach for identifying and evaluating potential failures using a service-specific failure mode and effect analysis (service-specific FMEA) and grey relational analysis. The proposed approach consists of two stages: construction of service-specific FMEA and application of grey relational analysis. The first stage, construction of service-specific FMEA, aims at incorporating the service specific characteristics to the traditional FMEA, providing 3 dimensions and 19 sub-dimensions, encompassing the service characteristics. At the second stage, grey relational analysis is applied to calculate the risk priority of each failure mode to deal with the necessities of a flexible evaluation framework under these interrelated multi-dimensions. The proposed approach is expected to help the service managers to manage the service failure within the systematic framework. This paper contributes to the field in that it incorporates the service-specific characteristics to the traditional FMEA, as well as providing the appropriate evaluation framework using grey relational analysis. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.