1. Improving the timeliness of SILC
SILC workshop Warsaw

2. Why – three arguments? Because we could
Because the upcoming regulation say we must do so
SILC is the most important of the Eurostat Statistics – it should be available as soon as possible

3. What has been accomplished?
Month of data delivery (cross sectional SILC)
SILC N+21 (September N+1)
SILC N+21
SILC N+20
SILC N+17
SILC N+18 (June N+1)
SILC N+11 (November year N)
SILC N+10 (October year N)

4. Identify bottlenecks Late availability of registers (mainly tax-data)
Mostly only one person could work at SILC at anytime
Manual time consuming tasks (Enter questionnaires, ISCO-coding etc.)
Unnecessary complexity in programs
Lack of structure and naming standards
Other statistics and tasks had higher priority than SILC data processing

5. Solutions
Faster income statistics – sometimes settle for earlier date of reference temporarily.
Modularize and use double manpower, when data is available -> shorter production period
Abandon Paper questionnaires
Structure and document
Impose naming standards, automate and remove hard-coding where possible.
Always give data processing high priority

6. The old SILC calendar

7. The new SILC calendar - modularized

8. Intuitive folder structure

9. Automatization (1)

10. Automatization (2)

11. Automatization (3) - ISCO
Respondent entered job-position ”I.E Nurse”. These were only coded manually for every respondent.
We introduced:
- Use of registers for currently employed
Automated search for job-positions in the job database
Improved software for the ones that need to be coded

12. Simple Proces documentation
Q:\Systemdokumentation\A1 Personstatistik\K10\SILC

13. Catch up period is tough
In order to catch up, you need to process SILC with less than a year in between each SILC-year.
Extra manpower and/or less alternate tasks are required in the catch up period. We
Got Inez on the job
Replaced annual publication on incomes with less time consuming web-based documents

14. Future targets Cross-sectional / preliminary SILC delivered by N+10
Longitudinal/Final SIILC delivered N+11

15. Work ahead for Final SILC
Longitudinal Weighting procedure: Reduce complexity, improve program structure, remove all remaining hard-coded parameters from input programs.
Challenge: Small sample and attrition bias leads to low quality of longitudinal SILC. It’s so poor that production of longitudinal SILC should not get priority over
Dissemination of income statistics
Dissemination of cross-sectional SILC
Increased efficiency should allow production of final SILC without causing significant delays to the dissemination.

16. Tips / summary
Retain data as fast as possible without compromising to much on quality
Modularize production – so more people can work on the production of SILC at once in busy periods
Remove or improve on slow manual processes
Be aware of trade offs between time spend and value of going into details.