Improving timeliness of industrial short-term statistics using time series analysis

The aim of this study was to improve the timeliness of the monthly statistics on sales development in the Dutch manufacturing industry. The focus was on producing timely indicators in the presence of missing data. Currently, missing data are imputed using, besides already available data for the month in question, known data from only one previous month, whereas we propose to use whole time series for that purpose. It was concluded that timeliness can be improved from 37 days to 27 days after the end of the month, without sacrificing accuracy.