In theory, the management control of maintenance functions is described as problematic due to the nature of the work performed in the unit. The purpose of this thesis is to examine these predicted problems in practice. Further,the thesis aims at identifying how these control problems may affect the relationships between the maintenance department and its internal customers. A case study has been conducted in one of Sweden?s largest industrial companies to investigate the said control problems in practice.

Title: A Business Perspective on Reducing the Climate Impact from Tetra Paks Transportations of Goods. Authors: Pär BerglundSebastian Lyngström Supervisors: Lars J Nilsson, Environmental and Energy Systems, Lund UniversityNils Månsson, Department of Business Administration, Lund University Problem Analysis: Increased awareness concerning climate change will put pressure on companies to reduce their climate impact. Problems arise when trying to reduce the impact from transportations due to companies? limited control on forwarding agents and difficulties measuring the emissions. Purpose: From a business perspective, this report will enable a reduction of the climate impact that arises from Tetra Paks transportation of goods.

Background: As companies are operating in more globally and complex environments, the need for risk control is accelerating. In an ever-changing environment, companies cannot merely focus on traditional risks, which include financial and insurable risks. To maintain competitiveness, companies need to extend their risk management to include all risks, traditional as well as operational and strategic risks. Purpose: The purpose is to describe and position risk management for Telecom operators, in comparison with the risk management literature, with regards to structure, processes, learning process, visions and benefits. In addition, our aim is to link risk management perspectives with the different strategies for knowledge management.

Background and problem: Higher and other demands are made on management control systems in organizations which have a superior non-financial objective. Systembolaget, a state-owned company with monopoly to sell alcoholic beverages in Sweden, combines two main objectives which can be considered as conflicting, one financial target and one superior non-financial public welfare target. The research questions are focused on the translation of information through the organization?s levels and if the management control system makes it possible to run the organization according to both of the two main conflicting objectives.Purpose and Delimitations: To describe, analyze and evaluate how management control can be used in an organization, which is not profit maximizing and has both non-financial and financial objectives. The essay does not try to describe or draw generalized conclusions regarding general perspectives on Systembolaget?s assignment and objectives.Method: A qualitative and evaluative case study based on interviews with five employees at different levels in Systembolaget has been carried through.

 Bachelor thesis within Business AdministrationTitle: Effective estate managementAuthor: Joacim StåhlPatrik StyrbjörnTutor: Gunnar WramsbyDate: 2008-06-05Subject terms: Estate management, efficiency, key figure, good examples, manager, real estate Abstract:Background: Concerning the global economy and the picture given in real estate business that efficiency and profitability are needed to survive is it intresting to study and search for good example to reach an effective and profitable estate management.Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to describe the work of real estate concern to reach efficiency and profitability from the owner/manager perspective.Method: Through qualitative interviews with eight respondents in four different real estate concerns describe good examples on effective estate management and with this fulfil the purpose of this essay. Two interviews per company were made, one at the company and one over phone to reach better security concerning the answers.Theory: The theory is divided in to four mainparts were the first two explains estate management and financial control. Thereafter comes an impression concerning efficiency and how efficiency is secured in estate mangement from a theoratical perspective.Empiri: This part of the essay is about the interviews made and through them show how real estate concern works with efficiency by focusing on good examples in which the companys find themself efficient.Analysis: Comparing the theories and the empirical research to analys and try to describe efficient estate management.Conclusions: Efficient estate management is about controlling the costs and especially about the opreating costs. Important to reach operative efficiency is therefore to continuosly follow up the costs and to do readings every month. To compose and continuosly work with budget and action plans for each estate is important in order to reach efficiency in the management of estates.

AbstractBachelor thesis G3 in Business Administration, Linnaeus University School of Businessand Economics, Financial Control, 2FE90E, Spring Semester 2010Authors: Kennerth Eriksson and Leo H KochAdvisor: Lars-Göran AidemarkTitle: Balanced Scorecard in governmental organizations ? About, how and its meaning.Background:  The Balanced Scorecard is a Control System that includes both financial andnon-financial measures which intend to link the short-term business management with the long term vision and strategy. Businesses in the public sectors are different fromthe private sector on several levels and they often seek to reach multiple targets.Therefore, their choice of Control System becomes interesting. According to the SwedishNational Financial Management Authority (Ekonomistyrningsverket) among others, thereis no clear knowledge of how widespread the Balanced Scorecard is in governmentalorganizations. The lack of that knowledge is one of the questions at issue with this thesis.Is it only a few organizations that are using the Balanced Scorecard or parts of the model?Another question at issue is about how the Balanced Scorecard is used in the point ofcontrolling in the organizations we chose to investigate further.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is partly to investigate the existence and use of theBalanced Scorecard in governmental organizations and partly to describe the design ofthe Balanced Scorecard in the studied organizations and explain why they have chosen towork with the Balanced Scorecard and what impact it has on them.Demarcation: The first part of this study has been demarked to only look at the existenceof the Balanced Scorecard in governmental organizations.

Uppsatsen avser belysa och utveckla förståelsen för de sociala och ekonomiska verksamhetsmotiv som existerar inom socialt entreprenöriella organisationer samt undersöka hur dessa motiv hanteras. Av denna anledning är det intressant att utgå från ett målkonfliktsperspektiv, varpå verksamhetens intressenter även beaktas eftersom de påverkar organisationen och dess målsättningar. Studien påvisar att socialt entreprenöriella företag tvingas förhålla sig till flertalet sociala och icke-sociala verksamhetsmotiv som till viss del motverkar varandra och skapar målkonflikter, och till viss del samexisterar genom synergier. Dessutom är sociala och ekonomiska motiv vanligen konträra och orsakar begränsningar i verksamhetsstrukturen, varpå målkonflikter lättare uppstår. Det framgår att företagens lönsamhet och utvecklingsmöjligheter hämmas av de begränsningar som de sociala motiven medför.

Titel: Mystery Shopping - en studie av franchisekedjor i Sverige Författare: Bodil Carlson och Mikael Hugosson Handledare: Thomas Michel, Universitetslektor, IEM Kurs: Kandidatarbete i Företagsekonomi 10 poäng, FEC007 Institution: Institutionen för Ekonomi och Management Syfte: Trots att Mystery Shopping tillägnas relativt stor uppmärksamhet i massmedia finns det idag ingen forskning med inriktning mot företagsekonomi. Syftet med denna studie är att bidra till en ökad medvetenhet om Mystery Shopping, kartlägga dess förekomst samt försöka besvara frågan huruvida Mystery shopping är en vedertagen teknik för kvalitetskontroll i serviceföretag. Metod: Studien genomfördes i två steg, en förstudie med ett Mystery Shoppingföretag samt en huvudstudie inriktad mot svenska franchisekedjor. Den definierade målpopulationen bestod av 44 franchisegivare Av dessa besvarade 29 företag enkäten. Slutsatser: Av de 29 tillfrågade företagen hade 22 kännedom om Mystery Shopping.

Syftet med vår studie är att finna faktorer till spridningen av kalkylmodellerna Activity-based costing (ABC), Target costing (TC) och Kaizen costing (KC). Detta gör vi genom att använda oss av kvalitativ ansats och genomföra intervjuer vid sex tillverkande företag. Vi kan se influenser av spridningen av modellerna ABC, TC och KC i studiens företag. Det har visat sig att företagen tillämpar ?traditionell? produktkalkylering med inspiration av ABC-modellen.

Syftet är att undersöka individers upplevelser av barriärer mot kunskapsdelning inom organisationer som använder extern arbetskraft i jämförelse med organisationer som ej använder extern arbetskraft. I denna uppsats har en hermeneutisk ansats använts för att studera individers upplevelser av barriärer mot kunskapsdelning. Respondenterna som deltagit i studien var från fyra olika organisationer där två av organisationerna använde sig av extern arbetskraft medan två endast använde sig av ordinarie personal. Vi utförde både intervjuer och enkätundersökningar på organisationer med extern personal och organisationer med bara ordinarie personal. Resultatet från vår studie visar att de upplevda barriärerna mot kunskapsdelning i vissa lägen skiljer sig åt mellan ordinarie- och extern personal. Det har rått konsensus bland de studerade organisationerna om att tidsbrist är den främsta barriären mot kunskapsdelning mellan ordinarie personal och extern personal, vilket har visat sig främst bero på den externa personalens korta anställning. Även bland ordinarie personal är det främst tidsbrist som upplevs som den främsta barriären mot kunskapsdelning.

Traditional financial management has lately been criticized, since it gives inadequate and unilateral information for decisions and strategy of the operation. The purpose of this essay is to investigate if a balanced scorecard is able to work together with a budget and become a stronger control system for the management. Essential theory underlies the gathering of data as well as the analysis, and the empirical investigation is based on personal interviews. The conclusions drawn from my analysis are that two parallel control systems could complement each other?s weaknesses.

The purpose of this essay was to examine whether small businesses can avoid ac-counting crimes with a well-conducted internal control system. The questions we asked ourselves was, whether and if so, companies can prevent this from happening by using a internal control.In this essay we used a qualitative approach. Essential information was given to us from four different interviewees. We also worked from an inductive approach which means that we interviewed people without any earlier research to build on. The method also had a hermeneutical approach, which means that we made different interpretations based on the reference framework and the empirics.After the study had been carried out, we concluded that all evidence from this essay suggested that even small businesses need an internal control to protect their business.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka i vilken utsträckning implementeras internprissättningen inom Karlskrona kommun samt vilken roll har internprissättningen för organisationen. I min studie har jag kommit fram till att inom en offentlig verksamhet som är en divisionaliserad organisation, är internprissättningen ett viktigt styrverktyg. Detta bidrar till att offentliga organisationer underlättas till att följa upp resultatenheterna inom organisationen, man får en rättvis kostnadsfördelning samt att risken för felaktiga kostnadsbeslut elimineras. Detta leder till att personalen blir kostnadsmedvetna. .

This thesis studies private equity firms' implementation of management control systems in their portfolio companies and whether the systems are affected by cross-national differences. A comparative case study examines five different private equity firms to derive if there are any differences between the private equity firms' management control systems in the United States, Europe and China. The empirical observations are categorized according to the framework developed by Merchant (1985) and further developed by Merchant and Van der Stede (2003). Theory on the effect of multinationality on management control systems, also developed by Merchant and Van der Stede (2003), are used to explain possible findings. The applied theory includes the cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede (1984) and Hofstede and Bond (1988).

Kopplingar mellan interna prestationsmätningar och ständig förbättring undersöks genom fallstudie av IKEA Food Service. Uppsatsen genererar fem hypoteser kring ämnet..