The manufacturing industry is currently in a short-term downturn while the competition is increasing. The result of this is that companies must find new ways to bring out their products. Traditional competitive strategies, such as low pricing, is not sufficient today as the customer is inquiring something more than just a good product. Higher demands are presented on an accurate, well functional, communication between customer and companies, as this has become an important strategic factor in achieving long-term profitability.The aim of this independent project was to analyze and evaluate the communication process between a company and its sales companies.In order to illustrate this process, a case study was carried out at Alfa Laval, their sales companies and employees at their distribution center in Tumba. In order to see the differences in attitudes between the management, the sales companies and the employees regarding communication and involvement a gap analysis were used.The theoretical part of the study considers theories about business mission, communication, involvement, quality and creating value.The result showed that a smaller gap exists between the sales companies and the management while a slightly larger one exists between the employees and the management.

The use of Web applications is a growing area. While the possibilities and functionalities are increasing, so is the complexity of them, together with the threats against them because the complexity also opens up the application to vulnerabilities. It is therefore important for developers to know how a web application can be developed with security in mind.This study?s intention has been to create an introductory documentation of what kind of techniques that exists which can produce higher security, which methods there can be within the development process and what to think about when programming secure web applications. In this paper we have investigated how theoretical manuals in the IT security department handles that area, and interviewed two developers from two different companies to see how they use security in their web applications.The study has an exploratory technical perspective and does not explain how to practically use and interconnecting different security-enhancing technologies, but is more suppose to give a first glance at what is available and sow a seed for those interested to continue reading further about the subject.

During the last decade of the twentieth century both ?manhood? and gender studies seems to have undergone changes. With the field of masculinity and the critical studies of men, added as ?subsections? of broader gender studies, new knowledge has been produced to better grasp the production of gender and power relations of patriarchy. During the same decade as the ?metrosexual? first appeared of the urban stage, acts of homophobia and attitudes towards ?manhood? seems to have changed.

AbstractThe concept project is today used in several contexts and has different meaning in different contexts. Lately, projects have been seen as a form of organization and more companies convert from traditional organizing to organizing in a project form. The purpose and focus of today?s project is not only to increase quality and competence development for management but also to integrate different actors in order to e.g. increase customer value.LänsTeknikCentrum AB (LTC) in Jönköping is running different projects in order to support companies in Jönköping County.

Boberg at Scania CV AB. The purpose was to investigate the technical and customer oriented possibilities for the development of a transport security measure against cargo crime, which is a growing problem in Europe. The main goal was to develop a concept that is possible to implement in the Scania CV AB Fleet Management System. Another goal was to develop a security model that will be used as a tool during Scania CV AB?s future development projects of transport security concepts.The work was divided into three main parts: a background study, handling cargo crime, transport security Scania CV AB trucks and market analysis, a stakeholder investigation including a questionnaire and interviews, and a concept development session.

From the customer?s perspective the only reason for a firm to exist is the value it creates. However, a problem within manufacturing companies is that of the total lead time, only a small part can be considered as value adding. It has further been discovered that when working with improvements businesses often sub-optimizes single processes instead of considering what benefits the entire company. Thus, when improving processes and activities it is important to have knowledge about and understand which factors that affect how the flow can be designed.Several studies have been performed with a wide perspective on process flows in order to obtain a more resource-efficient and value added flow.

This master thesis reviews advances in detection and diagnosis of static friction (stiction) in control valves. Control valves suffering from stiction results in oscillating control loops which in turn decreases both the process stability and reliability. Perstorp AB sees a necessity to automatically detect stiction in valves before the effects of the malfunctioning valves have become too severe. This thesis presents an introduction to maintenance, control loops and how stiction in valves can affect performance of control loops.A selection of methods presented in the literature are introduced and examined using normal operating data from the site in Perstorp. Common for all selected methods is their intuitive ideas and that they are based on normal operating data and minimum amount of process knowledge.

The project is a practical and theoretical test of IP telephony with Skype in order to form a base for a comparison between IP-Telephony with Skype and the Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN). PSTN is the common standard that most of us use for telephony today. The objective for the study is to simplify the choice between PSTN and IP-Telephony for the Swedish private customer user group. The project is supposed to answer the following questions. - How easy is it to start using IP-telephony with Skype? - How is the quality of IP-telephony compared to PSTN? - Are all services provided by PSTN available and accessible using the IP-solution? - How are the usability and the availability of support with IP telephony? - Is IP-telephony a cheaper solution and in that case under which circumstances? Within the project a collection of practical and theoretical tests have been performed to be able to form an opinion on the IP-solution in the following areas, installation, function, quality, usability, costs, accessibility and security.

Environmental issues is now taking a growing place in society and to ensure that companies meet public expectations and do their part in working towards a sustainable development, environmental management system is said to be an effective tool (Almgren & Brorson, 2009).This case study has examined a company's environmental management system in order to find strengths and weaknesses within the ISO 14001 system. The work was carried out using interviews, document reviews and analyzes in which the three main concepts control the report ; "daily work", "audit" and "environmental aspects".The results shows that the daily work looks different depending on where you are; in the production or at the office. The audit examined all documents related to the environmental management system and the study showed that the biggest strengths was the commitment and waste handling while areas such as environmental goals and management review needed improvement. As a result of the deficiencies identified, suggestions for improvements was proposed. The investigation of the routine of the environmental aspects showed an incomplete routine where the red wire from identification to evaluation was missing.

This paper aims to discover if the customers meeting with a company?s website can be described through theories derived from both web usability and theories concerning physical meetings between customers and salespersons in a traditional way. The conducted research involves five interviews as well as participating observations witch where analyzed with a hermeneutical approach. The most prominent results are that the web based customer meeting can be described through both of the theoretical perspectives witch results in a broader and more colorful portrayal of the individuals encounter with a commercial website..

This study has been conducted with the purpose to examine the marketing effects of waiting lines on the customer- and brand experience. Our ambition has been to describe how the waiting line can be used to heighten the positive experiences. The study has had a qualitative, as well as an inductive approach towards the subject. The study is mainly based on nine interviews with a total of ten respondents employed at nine different companies relevant to the subject. In the final chapter of this study we present our results and conclusions..

The main purpose of this study was to investigate which enter- and exit barriers that exist on the banking market for small enterprises located within the region of Gotland. The reason was to examine and identify which barriers that could affect the mobility among small enterprise bank customers on the bank market. To identify the barriers, the study was carried out partly by a quantitative survey with 33 small business owners respondents located at three different concentrated small enterprise areas within the region of Gotland. And partly by qualitative interviews that were conducted with two employees at Länsförsäkringar Gotland Bank.The result indicated that the enter barrier mostly depended on the aspect that business owners of small enterprises believed that bank switching were complicated. The business owners did also consider bank switching as time demanding.

Problem: The corrugated board industry is highly affected by customer uncertainty, various demands and short delivery times. In combination with a complex multi-step production process managers have to be able to identify bottle-necks and gain knowledge and understanding of how different changes in process will affect the production output. <br/><br/>Purpose: The purpose of this master thesis is twofold, (1) to examine applicability of complexity theory through agent-based modelling on a production process (2) to identify improvement areas in order to increase the production output at SKS production site in Eslöv, by modelling and simulating the production process through an agent-based model. <br/><br/>Method: The chosen method of this study is a combination of a case study and a complex system approach. The empirical data was collected through interviews, observation and document studies which were analysed through an agent-based simulation model.

Social enterprises make up one of the groups of participants that provide welfare services financed by public funding. The object of this study is to describe and analyze from a theoretical point of view which conditions, in what fields, by which division of responsibility and finally through what decisions these social enterprises are allocated a place in the market for social welfare services. The company that has been the object of study offers services in the field of social welfare and in employment. In the study a triangulation of qualitative methods has been used: studies of literature on the subject, recurrent interviews and observations and also reviews of documents. The results have been analyzed from theories on the space available on the market for social services, on social economy and on social capital in the form of strong, weak and bridging bonds.

Relationsmarknadsföring består av att antingen skapa, upprätthålla eller avsluta relationer gentemot företagets kunder. Betydelsen av att upprätthålla relationer med befintliga kunder har ökat under de senaste åren, mestadels på grund av en ökad global konkurrens. Frågan är då hur ett företag upprätthåller relationen med kunden, när det väljer eller tvingas avveckla en distributionskanal vilket begränsar möjligheten till fysisk närvaro gentemot kunden. Denna uppsats syftar därmed till att utreda hur ett företag kan bibehålla kundrelationen när den fysiska kontakten gentemot kunden begränsas. I syfte att undersöka detta utfördes två fallstudier på Scandinavian Airlines System, SAS och Zytt.