Prioritization of threat factors for pipeline operator's reputation sustainability from customer's perspectives

Abstract

A company reputation solely depends on how their stakeholders perceive them and their attributes, e.g., onshore oil and gas pipeline damage; sustaining the company reputation level amidst this deadly event is a great challenge to the owner. This article aimed to prioritise the contributing indicators of reputation loss as influenced by the customer perspective. These indicators were identified according to the 10 major onshore oil and gas pipeline explosion case studies; about 72 respondents had participated in the survey for data collection. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method was used to prioritise the factors and produced results as follows: factor A3 “Downgraded owner’s ranking by ranking agencies”, factor B2 “Bad word-of-mouth among customer”, factor C3 “Accident facts hidden for personal interest” and factor D3 “Accident severity” were chosen to be the highest priority based on the customers’ perception. This factor prioritisation process assists the owner to attend to these matter so that the impact of reputation loss, which influenced by the customer, may be avoided. Eventually the consequence assessment for pipeline damage can be successfully applied to evaluate the level of loss to be borne by the asset owner and eventually sustain the reputation of the company.