HNS 136b: A survey of approaches used to calculate the cost of production

Production-based costing tools for individual HNS product lines were previously considered unnecessary by many businesses. External financial pressures and overproduction, however, harsher business conditions meant that nurseries without a good understanding of their changing productions costs have became vulnerable to making losses. 

In order to address levy payer demand for help with this problem, the HDC commissioned project HNS 136a (ongoing) to develop decision support tools to help improve the profitability of HNS nurseries.  A decision support tool is a computer-based program that can be used by nursery managers to generate information that aids them to make important decisions (e.g. about setting prices, managing space and estimating future demand).

To build the most useful tools for the largest number of levy payers, it was necessary to carry out an HNS industry-wide survey on the approaches currently used to cost production, manage space and forecast demand.