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.