China is a unique market that differs from the Western market in many ways. Companies are not required to publicize financial reports, and furthermore a heavy focus on business relationship building can make it hard for companies to have high quality streams of data to get insights about their markets. For a consultant company to successfully enter the Chinese market and helping producing and technological global firms improving their insights on the Chinese market, the consultant company needs to understand which the important factors are and how those factors can help in creating value for their potential customers. To help the analyzing and consultant firm called Kairos Future, a qualitative case study was conducted on 16 different global companies with focus on industrial production. The case study was mainly conducted through face to face interviews with decision makers who had a broad understanding of their respective companies.

This paper is about the new methods and metrics used in industry and business today striving for better revenues and larger market shares. It investigates the relations between the old fordistic and tayloristic way of manufacturing and compares it to the models used in industry today for being competitive, seeking to please customers and becoming more flexible. More specific the paper is about if Six Sigma and lean production are the key for succeeding these days. SKF:s factory in Gothenburg and other companies will make an example for how these methods are used in practice.The aim is to try to answer if these systems with inherited tools and methods are the right way to get the flexibility that is needed for being able to deliver the right goods to customers and market. For a company to be flexible decisions must be made fast and needed changes must be able to be done easy and without too large costs and investments.

Due to the globalization and the changes in the market, companies have now realized the importance of a strong brand. This has led to the phenomena outsourcing. The relation between the branding consultant and his or her client has changed. Earlier the consultants worked as a single unit and were given a task to independently accomplish the assignment. Today there has to be co-operation between the two parties.

In 2010 mandatory audit was revoked for small and medium sized companies in Sweden. At the same time the authorization for accounting consultants was established with the aim of raising the knowledge and status of the profession. Even though The Swedish Companies Registration Office has discovered more errors in the accounting after the mandatory audit was eliminated, it especially concerns those companies who does not have neither an auditor or an accounting consultant. One of the reasons often mentioned to be audited is the auditors role when it comes to lending decisions. Our empirical studie show that the auditors most important function, being unbiased, is not what is of greatest importance for the credit institutions.Instead it was professional skills, and for small and medium enterprises (SME) it was consulting they requested the most.

This thesis examines why working time preferences differ between workers and nations, and explains the effect of working time regulation and working time flexibility on negotiating work-life balance. In five separate sections the following working time issues are examined: the number of hours worked by workers in Europe; factors affecting individual working time preferences; how working time preferences are negotiated in the national industrial relations systems of Sweden, France and the United Kingdom; how the institutions of the European Union have influenced working time negotiations through the Working Time Directive; and the benefits and practices available to organisations implementing working time flexibility. Broadly this paper views working time preferences as being a highly personal and influenced by factors such as wages, taxation, culture (national and workplace) and non-work responsibilities. It is argued that negotiating a preferred working time pattern is essential to achieving work-life balance and when such a balance is achieved, workers are more healthy, motivated and committed to their employer. Essentially this provides an incentive for businesses to voluntarily implement working time flexibility beyond the regulatory standards..

It can be difficult for young people to find their first job; a solution to this problem may bethrough temporary work at a staffing agency to gain their first experience. As temporary workers,individuals are often forced to frequently change their jobs, which require that the company'sprocesses for introduction are able to transfer the needed knowledge and the temporal employee´s capacity to quickly learn a new role. Knowledge management and knowledge transfer areimportant aspects to most organizations, but how are these aspects used when introducing temporarystaffing personnel to new work? The purpose of the study is to identify the process oftemporary staffing to identify possible suggestions for improvement based on principles ofknowledge transfer. The research question "How can the transfer of knowledge be developed forthe introduction of new staffing personnel?" is divided into sub questions;? ?How is the processto hire temporary staff performed??, ?What problems can occur in the process of introduction ofnew temporal staff?? and ?How can ICT be used to support the introduction of temporal staff??.The theoretical framework is based around theories of the context in which the knowledge transferred,what type of knowledge is to be transferred, the channels that are possible to use to transferknowledge through, employees function as channels to transfer knowledge with a special emphasison the role of the mentor, and the transferee's own motivation and the capacity to receivethe knowledge that is being transferred.To understand the process of hiring temporal staff, a survey was performed using open-ended interviewswith consultants at employment agencies, and with the support of the frameworkDELTA Meta Architecture.

Human Resource Management (HRM) consultants are becoming more common. Simultaneously there is a lack of HRM in small and medium enterprises (SME?s). SME?s states neither to afford, nor have the time to perform HRM in their business.This thesis is a Working Scholarly essay based on qualitative method, based on ten semi- structured interviews.

Problemområdet som uppsatsen belyser är sambandet mellan organisationstillhörighet och autonom motivation inom IT-konsultbranschen. Forskning om dessa områden har tidigare utförts främst var för sig, men har på senare år kopplats mer och mer samman. Dessutom har undersökningarna inom konsultbranschen enbart gjorts på bemanningsföretag. Utifrån sambandet och i förhållande till nuvarande teorier tas tre hypoteser fram och prövas. Metoden som använts i undersökningen är en enkätundersökning bestående av frågor angående organisationstillhörighet och motivation.

Introduction: The world is changing rapidly and the uncertainty that characterizes today´s society makes companies preparations for the future crucial. Purpose: To examine how CEO:s in small companies look at the future and what kind of preparations they make in order to meet it. Hereby, our ambition is to find out whether there is a difference between companies working in industries characterized by different degrees of stability. Mode of procedure: The purpose of this thesis has been fulfilled by interviews with four CEO:s from industries characterized by different degrees of stability. Result: The companies working in relatively unstable environments tended to be relatively more flexible and have an emergent strategy formation process, whereas companies working in relatively stable environments displayed relatively less flexibility and tended to have a planning strategy formation process..

The aims of the present study were to implement and evaluate a three-session Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) stress management intervention in a non-clinical group of university students (N = 25) and to investigate the importance of practice in an ACT-intervention. A design with pre-test and double post-test was chosen. A comparison was made between a nine-hour ACT-intervention containing practice for the participants, a two-hour lecture on ACT and stress management containing no practice for the participants and a control group. Psychological flexibility was assessed with Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-2 and mindfulness was measured with Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills. Perceived stress level was measured with Perceived Stress Scale.

Flexible working conditions is used extensively in organizations today as a way tocreate flexibility for the employer. Recently we?ve been reading in the newspapersthat this approach is a growing problem and the EU has warned Sweden twice thatabuse of these forms of employment must be stopped. The Government has recentlysubmitted a proposed rule change to reduce the possibility of stacking one temporarycontract after another. Borlänge kommun makes themselves more flexible with theintermittent employments.

This is a heuristic evaluation of Umeå university library?s Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). It makes use of four of Nielsen?s ten heuristics, flexibility and efficiency to use, match between the system and real world, visibility of system status, and aesthetic and minimalist design. The evaluation was done by having 3 evaluators inspect the interface individually, as per Nielsen?s (1990) recommendation of 3-5 evaluators.

HMS Networks AB develops, produces and sells communication technology for industrial automation. The product handles communication between a variety of protocols. The product treated in this project is an Anybus X-gateway Modbus-TCP Master/Client and this module is currently configured from a web-based interface. In doing so, the flexibility for handling protocols is limited to what the company chooses to add to the interface. Therefore the company had a request that the flexibility should be extended using a script language.

Growth of small businesses is vital to the Swedish economy, and many entrepreneurs want their enterprises to grow. However, the business climate of today is more changing than ever, and attributes becoming increasingly important for companies in order to deal with this are flexibility, speed, and adaptability: characteristics normally attributed to small enterprises. As a larger organization often is associated with more rigidity as a consequence of a higher degree of formalization, entrepreneurs are hesitant to seize growth opportunities, as they fear it will have negative impact on the aforementioned competitive advantages their enterprise possesses as a small business. This simple case study of a growing small enterprise investigates the effects of organizational growth on a small business' organizational structure and through its above mentioned advantages. The study finds that avoiding formalization while growing damages the competitiveness of the firm, and concludes that a degree of formalization is a necessity to maintain the flexibility, speed and adaptability in a growing small business..

Affärssystem har blivit allt vanligare i organisationer och framhålls av systemleverantörer som ett verktyg för att öka organisationers flexibilitet. Forskning tyder dock på att affärssystem både kan öka och minska flexibiliteten för organisationer. Få empiriska studier har genomförts vad gäller affärssystems påverkan på organisationers flexibilitet och forskningen är splittrad vad gäller affärssystems påverkan på flexibiliteten för organisationer. Syftet med denna uppsats är att illustrera och förklara hur ett affärssystem påverkar flexibilitet i en organisation. För att besvara syftet skapas en analysmodell som syntetiserar tidigare forskning om flexibilitet med en organisatorisk förändringsmodell.