A delphi approach to identifying the severity of downtime influence factors impacting naval ship operational availability — does the Panel Demographic Impact the Expert Opinion?

High Operational Availability of Naval vessels remains a challenge to many navies worldwide despite increasing and novel approaches to availability. Numerous literatures are published on concepts of availability optimization, nevertheless so far there has been limited holistic research into the combined human and equipment root causes of naval vessel unavailability caused by the various downtime or simply put the naval Downtime Influence Factors (DIFs). To overcome the literature shortage a Delphi approach into the DIFs for the Royal Malaysian Navy In-Service Support for Patrol Vessels was carried out to shed light into unavailability causes and to pinpoint the areas of improvement. In the first stages of the Delphi study a panel of 30 professionals directly involved in naval ship maintenance was selected. A common criticism of the Delphi technique highlights that the selection of experts significantly influences the outcome of the studies. This research analyses via descriptive statistics whether the demographics of the expert sample had an impact on the outcome of the expert opinion, concluding that in most cases neither gender, designation, years of experience, organization type or qualifications impacted the weightage of importance allocated to each DIFs explaining outliners where applicable.