The service FMEA can be effectively used as means for analyzing the risk due to unfavorable business situation. Following Seyedhoseini and Hatefi [1], within risk management framework, corrective action provision is as important as risk quantification. Nevertheless, previous references on improving capability of FMEA in service operation such as [2–6] do not address the issue. Furthermore, improvement of FMEA-based corrective action methodologies such as [7–12] seems to be still applied to nonservice sectors. Moreover, as Groso et al. [13] stated, it is also very important to consider possibility of risk occurrence during improvement efforts. But the previous studies ignore the degree of uncertainty on outcome of strategy implementation, without mentioning the importance on articulation of management desirability.
This paper presents a conceptual model on ranking corrective action priority, which considers the uncertainty of improvement effort and the strategic function of managing risk in service quality improvement efforts. The model is formulated so that the preference score can be determined on the basis of team desirability, efforts, impacts, and relevant risk for each competing corrective action.
The remaining part of the paper is presented according to the following sections. In Section 2, the desirability function and other key concepts are presented. Section 3 constructs a new model to estimate attractiveness index of competing corrective actions based on team desirability, effort, and risk of implementing corrective action (CA). In Section 4, research methodology and a step by step implementation procedure are provided with an illustrative example. In Section 5, some discussions are provided with managerial implications followed by Section 6 conclusion.