The purpose of this thesis is to analyze and propose improvements to the current procedure for cost estimations of purchased maintenance work at Banverket, the Swedish rail administration. This governmental institution is responsible for the procurement of maintenance services for the country?s railroad network through open tenders. Due to the generally low number of contractors, it is particularly necessary to establish accurate cost estimates in order to assess the offers and ensure that a fair price is being paid to the suppliers. Several flaws associated with the current practice are identified and analyzed according to cost accounting theories.

The public service within health and care has changed remarkably during the last 30 years. It has been inspired by management ideas from profit-making businesses. Those thoughts are an umbrella term called Nex public management. In what way has New public management influenced the public service in Sweden? Important concepts in the change of public service are quality, effektivity and goals.

The cost of transportation has strongly increased in the recent years, transportations which are a major part for the construction companies. Skanska Asphalt which is a part of Skanska Sverige AB has noticed that there are significant cost savings to be made with the purchasing of transports. The transports in this case is about asphalt, where the costs are about 10% of the outsourcing business turnover. The purpose of this thesis is to study the working practice that Skanska Asphalt are using today in controlling and time-writing, for the asphalt transportations. Resulting in recommendations on how to improve the working practice at Skanska Asphalt.This study was conducted with the help of a number of interviews with Skanska?s employees and with suppliers of transportation to describe the practices which are being used in during the asphalt transportation.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate if the companies listed on Nasdaq/OMX Stockholm Large Cap use the earnings management phenomenon Big Bath Accounting to a greater extent when a change of management (CEO) is made.Management tends to use earnings management when there is a bonus plan linked to the result of the company. To gain maximum bonus the management will try to manipulate the result in a way that in a long term maximize their utility. Through the earnings management technique Big Bath the management is given the possibility to take one large cost as a one-time expend, even though the cost is supposed to run over several financial years. This, of course, within the legal framework. A big bath may occur when there is an impairment of goodwill, tangible and/or intangible assets or larger provisions for future expense, or both of them at the same time..

En sammanfattning av uppsatsen på maximalt 8000 tecken..

The theory that concepts that are interpreted subjectively in building care creates problems in how the concepts are defined in practice within the current governing documents and guidelines for building care. This essay has studied concepts in the building maintenance literature to investigate whether there is consensus in compliance practice within the building process. In the study, 9 concepts have been investigated through conversational interviews and questionnaires answered by practitioners with extensive experience in building care processes. In the survey, an attempt is made, to measure how big or small the consensus is between practitioners who often need to collaborate within the building maintenance process. The investigation shows that existence of the concepts in building maintenance is very common in the theoretical literature examined but is almost completely absent in the craft area. Since laws, regulations, principles, and guidelines have defined concepts to support the decisions in the building maintenance process, it can be concluded that there is a lack of practice for compliance.

I en mer global och konkurrensutsatt marknad krävs, i allt större utsträckning, att företag väljer att differentiera sig med specifika kundlösningar istället för den enskilda produkten. Genom att, tillsammans med kunden, skapa värde knyter man denna närmare till sig. Ett konsignationslager är en strategisk lagerlösning för att minska avstånden mellan kund och leverantör samt att minska kedjans totala lagerkostnad. SCA Timber har begränsad erfarenhet kring konsignationslager. Av den anledningen har det funnits oklarheter kring hur arbetet bör organiseras. Syftet med studien är att ta fram en best practice för hur SCA Timber ska arbeta med upprättandet av framtida konsignationslager. Studien är en multipel fallstudie av fyra verksamheter inom SCA och baseras på kvalitativa, semistrukturerade intervjuer med respondenter som varit inblandade i upprättandet av konsignationslager. Det empiriska materialet består av fjorton intervjuer. Studien utgår ifrån ett teoretiskt ramverk bestående av teorier kring projekt, kritiska framgångsfaktorer i projekt och skapandet av nyttjandevärde.

AbstractThe aim for this study is to establish how teachers and supervisors at the Child and Recreation Programme interpret the concept ?vocational knowledge?. It is also about how they substantially can see that the pupils are developing vocational knowledge, during their work placement training. The aim of this thesis is to create a base for teachers to work with continuing development in teaching practice. The empirical part of this study is based on interviews. Interviews were analyzed in three categories: definition of vocational knowledge, substantially developing in vocational knowledge and success factors. The result shows that knowing how and knowing why is salient in vocational knowledge.

There is limited research done in the area of management control in the relationship between companies. This study investigates management control in outsourcing relationships and the decision to change sourcing strategy and to insource functions. The empirical research was conducted at an international company, which in this study has been anonymized. The research is mainly based on interviews. To extend and verify the conclusions drawn, another company, AB Ph.

AbstractThe aim for this study is to establish how teachers and supervisors at the Child and Recreation Programme interpret the concept ?vocational knowledge?. It is also about how they substantially can see that the pupils are developing vocational knowledge, during their work placement training. The aim of this thesis is to create a base for teachers to work with continuing development in teaching practice. The empirical part of this study is based on interviews. Interviews were analyzed in three categories: definition of vocational knowledge, substantially developing in vocational knowledge and success factors. The result shows that knowing how and knowing why is salient in vocational knowledge.

En sammanfattning av uppsatsen på maximalt 8000 tecken..

Background: Motivation is a subject that is on everyone's lips in today's knowledge-intensive firms. What is motivation and what are we motivated by? We will, through three case studies, be grappling with the notion to clarify how managers and employees' perception of the concept is different, or possibly similar. Furthermore, the thesis examines whether the theory and practice of motivation are consistent with each other. Purpose: The purpose of our study is to seek understanding of what management within an organization believes are motivating their staff as well as how the staff perceive themselves be motivated by. We ask ourselves if organizations is up to date with the development of what motivates people.

Culture Management Cultural management administration producent KKE management.

The Chinese government´s aim to be self-sufficient in food production in combination with the increased food consumption in China has put high pressure on the productivity within the Chinese agricultural sector (He j et al, 2010). In order to increase the productivity, modernization and adoption of new farming techniques are essential. The opportunity to adopt and import foreign technology has lately been possible in China, as more authority and decision rights have been given to the individual farmers and the country has opened up for foreign trade (Zheng, 2012 & Fan, 1991). A more open Chinese market enables new opportunities for foreign agricultural companies to expand their businesses by introducing their products to Chinese farmers. But to succeed with this strategy the Chinese farmers must be willing to adopt these, for them new innovations. Minimum tillage is a tillage practice used worldwide that is suitable in northern China where drought and erosion are the main problems in the crop production (pers.com., Arvidsson, 2012). Potential users? opinion of new innovations such as minimum tillage is closely related to adoption (Rogers, 2003).

The aim of this thesis is to study social tagging in an OPAC by looking at the tags of Ann Arbor District Library?s catalogue. In this thesis I analyse the possibilities of social tagging. The main questions to be answered are what is the distribution of tags in different categories, what are the differences between fiction and non-fiction and how do the social tags differ from the terms of the professional indexing practice. Studying 500 tags I find that subject matter was the most frequent category for tags assigned to fiction and non-fiction.