2214 NEW ZEALAND GAZETTE, No. 90 21 JULY 2004

Programming Costs

In some circumstances, programming will be necessary for the core data to be extracted and provided to the Applicant. These programming costs are additional to Livestock Improvement’s normal business. They are charged at Livestock Improvement’s standard internal hourly charge rate for programming, or at actual cost if Livestock Improvement decides to have this work outsourced. Where the user requests subsequent changes to the program, that cost is also charged on this basis at the time of the request.

In some circumstances, Livestock Improvement will incorporate or use its own proprietary software to undertake the provision of data more efficiently. When this circumstance occurs, Livestock Improvement will allocate a share of the development costs for this proprietary software to the amount charged, but the total programming charge will not be greater than the cost that would have been incurred if Livestock Improvement had undertaken the programming without incorporating or otherwise using the proprietary software.

Program Maintenance

An annual maintenance charge is made to keep the program in operation each year. This charge covers program updates to conform to changes in Livestock Improvement’s systems. This charge is in proportion to the size of the program development.

Costs of Collecting, Verifying, Correcting, Storing and Extracting Core Data

The costs of collecting, verifying, correcting, storing and extracting core data are accumulated from three of Livestock Improvement’s divisions: Genetics, Computer Services and Information. The bulk of these costs are borne internally by Livestock Improvement, with the balance of the core database costs (around one-third of the costs) being charged to Livestock Improvement’s MINDA division and third parties in the manner described below.

Some of the costs (core database infrastructure costs) are fixed because they are incurred regardless of the number of animals recorded on the database. Other costs will vary with the number of animals whose records are held in the database. The charges for providing extracts of core data accordingly have fixed and variable components. Some applications for core data require only the records which are to be extracted to be held (i.e. they are not dependent on other data held in the database). Other applications require a larger part of the database to be available and the records in it evaluated in order to select those records to be extracted. In the former case, Applicants will be charged a variable charge per record extracted. In the latter case, the Applicants will be charged both the variable charge per record extracted and a fixed charge that relates to the fixed costs of establishing and maintaining the database.

Accordingly, three charges are made for this aspect of the provision of the core data:

(a) A fixed annual charge will apply to all parties which request core data, except those where the “primary key” (i.e. activating field) in selecting the data to be extracted is a “key field” as defined in the Regulations and its range is specified in the application (i.e. the records relate to specific herds or farms).