Since the Chinese economy?s reform in 1980, it has been attracting enormous foreign investments. Many Swedish firms from different sectors such as technology, manufactory production, consumer, service industries and so on, had started their investments in China. China has become the first choice for global manufacturing due to the huge market, continuous economic growth, stable political situation, sound investment environment and the WTO membership. In addition, China's enormous potential in finance, service, infrastructure, telecommunications, wholesales and retail industries will also attract a great deal of foreign capital.

As a result of global competition, companies within the automotive industry are required to improve their production systems to achieve sustainable and competitive production. To attain operational excellence, companies have adopted concepts like lean and World Class Manufacturing (WCM).In order to deliver, companies need to increase the availability and reliability of production equipment. This demands focus on both operational and strategic maintenance, and efficient equipment acquisition and management. The main objective of this thesis is to identify processes and success factors that are necessary for improved maintenance performance. By conducting a case study and by performing a literature review, the following has been studied: 1) how companies within the automotive industry work with maintenance and maintenance strategies, 2) implementation of maintenance strategies, and 3) new acquisition and spare parts management for maintenance. The results show that basic maintenance concepts and related terms are well defined in the literature.

The productiontime in the construction industry contains of many different participants which will take part in different events. When there is so many people working with the same project it is easy tosee one self just as a part of the game. The consequence of this is that they don?t see themselves as important participants whos knowledge, opinions and experience can be useful in the whole production process. This might lead to that they feel neglected and the consequence of that will be lackof motivation.

Bravida is one of Scandinavia's leading suppliers of technical installations and services. According to Bravida an installer loses around 35 per cent of their daily work. It?s the time aspect that?s going to be examined in this thesis. The purpose of this thesis is that the student in question is to investigate the activities of the installers that works with this project, identifying where and how time losses occur and come up with suggestions for improvement.Methods used in this work is literature studies, observational studies and interviews.

Light pollution in urban areas - How to prevent light pollution at construction Jakob Sjöling Light pollution is a relatively new but rapidly growing form of pollution. Society's increasing demand for light coupled with the pace at which lighting technology evolves is accelerating that growth. The purpose of this study was to analyse how the construction industry plan and design outdoor lighting when erecting new buildings, specifically with regards to the issue of light pollution. It also investigated how local authorities work with these issues during urban planning. In both cases special interest was placed in ways to improve the planning and use of outdoor lighting in order to minimize light pollution.

Parallel to new technological advancements, including the development of interactive recommender systems, digital music services on the Internet, such as Spotify, have in a short time span gradually replaced former physical media such as CDs and MP3-players and become pioneers on a market with an otherwise uncertain future. By subscribing to the service, users have access to a vast library of music and from any device with Internet access. In order to provide a satisfactory and useful musical experience, different ways of coping with the vastness is required - which is precisely what recommender systems are for. Improved filtering techniques and use of devices built in sensors, make way for new opportunities of more precise and contextually tailored suggestions for track selection, which in turn leads to potential privacy issues when using interactive music services. But where do we stand today? By compiling, exemplifying and discussing three different perspectives with relating to the development of interactive music recommender systems, the objective for this paper is to provide a for science, industry and user, objectively nuanced account of current potentials and expectations.

The main drivers of luxury consumption is to obtain prestige and status, therefore the possibility of visible consumption of products is a key dimension of the product. Typical examples of luxury goods include cars, handbags and watches. These are consumed in the public arena where the possibility to show off the product and the brand is the greatest. When examining luxury products and what drives men and women to pay premium prices for a brand and for a logo, a fascinating finding is that there are products that fundamentally lacks these attributes, but which are considered to be classic luxury products. An example of this is perfume.

The aim of this thesis is to study and analyze a village in the southern of Sweden called Gnosjö, which is famous for a special spirit of industrial success and entrepreneurship. Gnosjö has been successful and famous for many years but is now standing in front of several threats, like a growing number of out moving inhabitants, a low standard of education and difficulties for women to make carrier. Trying to reduce the threat of young inhabitants moving out, a new education program started three years ago with the purpose to make young students to be more interested in the technical development of the industry and make them stay in the district and hopefully be entrepreneurs.The research questions are; which consequences does ?Entekprogrammet? and the background of the students have on the students view on the spirit of Gnosjö, carrier in the local industries and wish of staying or moving from Gnosjö. Furthermore, I want to see if there are any differences between the girls and the boys, does sex have an influence on the view at the future? The study is made by qualitative and quantitative method.

Writers: Johan Lundqvist Eriksson and Elin SandbergSupervisor: Stig AnderssonEnglish title: Allocation of revenue in the hospitality industryKeywords: Revenue allocation, cost allocation, profit center, Du Pont model, taxes and manipulation of data.Date: January 2012Since the taxes for food and lodging has been different in Sweden for many years, the hospitality industry has come up with a way to save money on tax paying. When private customers stay for a weekend where the meals are included, the business is placing more than the relevant revenue on the lodging part, which has the lower tax. Because of this the results has improved and tax money has been saved. Now when the Swedish government has decided to lower the tax on food to the same level as the lodging, the chances for correct revenue allocation arises. When we approached the hospitality industry with our problem area a big interest was showed from the head chefs. They now see a chance to get more income on the meals and through this be able to show better results towards the owners.Two hotel managers at two different hotels and their head chefs were chosen for interviews.

The project team has chosen to carry out the project itself. This is to be able to work more flexibly in the product development process and not be guided by some guidelines.Every day, we read in the media about a new truck burglary. The problem has become so common that we do not even notice it in the media. Each year the theft of 1 billion of Sweden and the entire 82 billion in Europe in 2008. This is an increase of 10 billion by 2007.

Problem: Companies are becoming more active in social media. They usechannels such as Facebook, to communicate and interact with theirenvironment. In connection with this, companies must also be prepared todeal with crises in social media. Previous research shows no clear guidelineson how companies can work in social media to prevent crises.Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine how companiesin the communications industry can work with Facebook to prevent crises.We hope that our study can provide new perspectives and guidance on howcompanies can work with emergency communication for prevention.Methodology: We used a qualitative research to arrive at our results. Thismeant we got an insight into the complex world that companies are workingin.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the customer?s attitudes toward the contracting for availability, i.e., which factors are from the customer?s perspective necessary for the fulfilment of a supplier-customer agreement? Furthermore, the objective is to describe and analyse a supplier-customer relation in the Defence Industrial sphere.The present study has been carried out as a case study using an abductive approach. The thesis is based on a practical problem, i.e. which factors will be important to the customer when a contractor in the Defence Industry wants to increase its commitment of service, and how will their relationship change? The thesis is above all focused on generating knowledge that can lead to rapid and concrete measures and that can be used in the analysis of an increased industrial commitment but also as a case study of a problem of a more general nature in the Defence Industry.

Many companies have historically forced their interests through without any thoughts about the future needs of the humans and the society. In the last few years voices have been raised for a change, companies need to take their responsibility regarding sustainable development.The purpose of the report is to describe and explain possible relations between sustainabil-ity performance of companies and profitability, valuation, industry and size respectively.To be able to judge the sustainability performance of the companies Folksam (2006a) have been used. This is a solid investigation of the companies listed on the A- and O-lists of the Stockholm Stock Exchange by the end of 2005. The sustainability marks have been com-pared with the chosen key values for each hypothesis respectively. With this quantitative data as foundation, a quantitative approach and a deductive method have been used.In the first area of the investigation, profitability, the authors found correlation for the main hypothesis between sustainability performance and ?Return on Total Assets? through a statistical test.

Authors: Lars Johansson & Johan PetterssonTitle: ?There is way to much sports in the athletics? ? A study of Swedish sportsFootball has gone from being a hobby and a popular pastime into a billion-dollar industry, and clubs around Europe are therefore operated more and more like regular companies. Sweden's position in the UEFA rankings is a modest 23 rd place, behind nations such as Austria, Switzerland and Belarus. The economic climate in Sweden is often highlighted as a strong factor. When we started our study we agreed that this could be a major contributing factor to this relatively modest rank, but believed that there were also other factors that played a big role.

The development of productivity in the construction industry has long been at a steady state compared to the manufacturing industry. Studies have shown that, amongst other things, waste on construction sites can reach up to one third of the total production cost. This has been observed from different aspects, and change is forthcoming.This thesis aims to provide a foundation for an increased productivity at production sites of building bridges. It is primarily based on a field study at Skanska, at a bridge construction site near Grängesberg. Via continuous interviews with the whole production crew, construction workers and management, information on interference and possibilities of improvement at the work site has been documented.