A Review of Benchmarking Methods

• Activity Number: 645
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 2, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Business and Economic Statistics Section
• Author(s): Neil Parkin*+ and Gary Brown
• Companies: Office for National Statistics and Office for National Statistics
• Keywords: benchmarking ; Denton ; national accounts ; performance criteria

Abstract

In the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), sub-annual time series are routinely benchmarked to (a) improve their accuracy and (b) ensure consistency between published statistics. The production systems underpinning National Accounts, and other ONS outputs, require benchmarking on a massive scale - and therein lies the challenge. During development of these production systems, the benchmarking methods historically employed by ONS produced unrealistic results for some extreme types of time series. This prompted a research project to review standard benchmarking methods alongside current ONS approaches in terms of a list of common performance criteria. The aim was to find an approach which could be used to produce credible benchmarked outputs for large organisations involved in the analysis and reconciliation of large numbers of time series. This paper reports the findings of the project, and the conclusions drawn.