1. Incident reporting in the Swedish Consumer Price Index Martin Kullendorff, Oxana Tarassiouk Statistics Sweden Economic Statistics Department, Price Statistics martin.kullendorff@scb.semartin.kullendorff@scb.se, oxana.tarassiouk@scb.seoxana.tarassiouk@scb.se

2. Outline Why the routine? Defining incident The process Some results Conclusions Future work

3. Why the routine? We found that the error reporting routine (general routine at Statistics Sweden) was a very good tool for continuous improvements Inspired by others, we do not want to wait for a disaster (Nuclear meltdown, Plane crash… error in the CPI) Fact based methodology for working with continuous improvements Gives many possibilities to analyze the processes Less “no blame” with incident than with errors, and better conditions for an open minded analysis

4. Defining incident An incident is Something that could potentially cause an error but was discovered before reaching the user or An error that is too small to affect the user or Not pure error in data, but where additional resources were required

5. The process Identifying the incident and initiating the report Writing the reportApproval of the reportFollow-up routines

6. Some results in practice Since implemented 24 reports have been compiled Root causes found (roughly grouped) consists of: Insufficient documentation in the work descriptions (17 cases), Lack of or insufficient routines (17 cases), Insufficient planning (5 cases) …and one case hard to classify

7. Some results in practice Some quantifyable results Updated work descriptions (19 cases) Enhanced routines, amongst other by automating processes (16 cases) Training course (1 case) Only correction made and no long term actions taken (3 cases)

8. Conclusions Instead of only analyzing statistical errors (10) we had 34 (10+24) possibilities to do a fact based analysis of our processes Relatively small workload, on average 4 hours for taking short term action, analysis and writing report We have reached a safer and more efficient production process

9. Future work As we find the routine very helpful for working with continous improvements we will focus on two main areas: More reports should be compiled The reports should do more to find the root causes and to generalize

10. Future work To reach there we will: Encourage staff members to lower the limit for what they view as an incident Increase the willingness to report incidents by showing that the conclusions of the reports are taken care of, and that incident reporting is a possibility for staff members to influence the work at the unit Simplifying the reporting, especially when the burden of work is high Give better support to team members in finding the root causes of the incidents

11. Thank you for your attention!