In past decades information technology has changed the conditions of organizations, not at least within the industry. Advanced IT systems have become a fact in order to cope with rapid changes in the market and to effectively manage an organization?s knowledge. When organizations became more flexible and customized expectations from customers and stakeholders also become higher. These expectations and guidelines are documented in a company?s management system, which can be designed differently depending on what standards the company chooses to implement.

This thesis studies the concept of balance in the management control systems (MCS) of a small Swedish company within the IT-sector. The aim is to evaluate the importance of balance and dynamics in MCS and investigate which factors affect them. The frameworks used are Simons (1994) four levers of control, and the five-factor model for balance and dynamics by Mundy (2010). The small IT company - the object of the case study - has grown extensively in the last years and needs to develop more formal MCS without losing efficiency and creativity in their fast-moving industry. The case study reveals that balancing MCS is important also in smaller companies with less formal MCS.

Today significant resources are provided to improve the digital work environment within the Swedish healthcare to create efficiency, good work environment and patient safety. Despite this, major flaws are shown by the lack of communication between the eHealthcare systems. This becomes a stress factor among healthcare professionals because of increased administration and decreased physical contact with patients. The purpose of this study is to create a understanding of the concept of interoperability at different levels in the eHealthcare systems. This has been conducted through a qualitative interview study at a healthcare center where the respondents have been describing their digital work environment and the way it works today.

In system development it is today increasingly common to use a model-based system development method. These methods that are suited for Agile work with simple and quick updates and implementations of new applications in systems conform to the requirements that are becoming more important today, namely more flexible and less expensive system that still maintain high quality and safety.A company that has been working with this type of system development method for a long time is Genicore AB, which also has developed their own tools and model language in order to better model the information management systems in complex and abstract operations. Genicore AB is trying to spread their method other developers and have therefore taken the initiative to start this study. The method is evaluated and tested by two students with relatively little experience in model-based systems engineering in order to gain a new perspective on how the method functions. The method has been applied to an educational activity in order to test it in a new domain, and this led us to our research question;?What criteria are of particular relevance in the implementation of a MBSD method on on complex businesses??Through literature reviews and interviews, we formed an idea of how model-based system development works from a theoretical perspective, and then continued to the case study conducted on the educational activities at the faculty of IT at University of Gothenburg.

The implementation of a material requirements planning system is a complex and demanding task. There has been much research into what factors are important in such implementations, but seemingly very little about the links between critical success factors and management control systems. This thesis attempts, through a case study, to answer the question of how management control systems affect the implementation of an MRP system in ASSA AB, a Swedish manufacturing firm. Data is primarily collected through interviews. Theory regarding implementation success definitions, critical success factors as well as management control systems is presented.

This thesis presents a comparative study of image registration at two picture collection libraries. The two registration systems are analyzed as to the theoretical principles behind them and their practical application, and related to theoretical tools for subject analysis and bibliographic standards. While a growing number of picture collections now digitize their material, generally accepted standards and methods for the registration of digital images are still lacking. Many different systems coexist, often developed in-house in response to ad hoc needs and based on traditional registration tools created for textual documents, resulting in internationally incompatible mixed-format systems. The two picture collections examined here, however, have opted for similar, standardized tools for registration and subject analysis, and while there are differences in their application and focus, they have both considered issues of cross-system compatibility.

As the information society becomes increasingly flooded with digital images, the need for efficient image retrieval systems increases as well. To handle the vast amounts of data involved, the indexing process needs to be run automatically, using content-based descriptors extracted directly from the digital image, such as colour composition, shape and texture features. These content-based image retrieval systems are often slow and cumbersome, and can appear confusing to an ordinary user who does not understand the underlying mechanisms. One step towards more efficient and user-friendly retrieval systems might be to adjust the weight placed on various descriptors depending on which image category is being searched for. The results of this thesis show that certain categories of digital images would benefit from having extra weight assigned to colour, texture or shape features when searching for images of that category..

Scania CV is one of the world's largest truck manufacturer. It is not only the directproduction of vehicles and methods that are important for Scania but also the servicemarket handling spare parts, repairs and workshops. The department Vehicle ServiceInformation construct standard times through work measurement for particularworks in the workshops. The software application STAM is used in the servicemarket to create and store standard times which then are exported to theworkshops' own systems.The purpose of this master thesis is to analyse and evaluate the internal workmeasurement system that includes standard times and the software STAM. Also,based on external analysis and benchmarking of other systems suggest appropriatefuture development within the area for Scania Vehicle Service Information.In order to perform the investigation, interviews and studies have been doneinternally at the departments that are involved in work measurement as well asexternally at Scania workshops.

Companies today need to be more focused than ever on having an active Human Resource Management culture. This is not only because of the companies? concern for their staffs wellbeing, but for the companies? effectiveness in the long run. The reward systems which many corporations use today, to both keep their employees and attract new ones, is a well researched subject by scholars as well as journalists. Earlier research has suggested that it is important to implement an active Human Resource Strategy.

This master thesis covers the development of an automatic tuning process for the existing speed controller for drive systems. The drive systems are resonant two-mass systems where a motor is used to drive a load connected by a shaft. The developed method relies heavily on system identification and the construction of a complete mechanical model of the process. With this approach, the common problem with poor load speed control that derives from measuring only the motor speed can be addressed and solved for a majority of such processes.The automatic tuning method has along with general test functions been implemented in a complete tool for automatic tuning, testing and performance evaluation and reporting for drive systems..

The forestry companies? operational planning process is these days dependent on reliable, efficient and user-friendly computer-based support systems. This study is an evaluation of Holmen Skog's current computer-based systems. The aim of this study is to: ? investigate the work pattern of the production managers when using the information system to plan the harvesting operation; ? investigate the efficiency and user friendliness of the information system with the different work patterns and to find the strengths, weaknesses and bottlenecks in the current system; ? find out if the type of object, the volume, the area of the harvesting object affects the time and work pattern; ? examine how this type of study is met by the employees and what factors that is critical to avoid feelings of intrusion. The conclusions of the study were: ? there is a large variation between the work patterns of the production managers and the time spend to perform the operational planning; ? the mainframe computer system used by Holmen Skog is clear, has short response times, is robust and conveys relevant information; ? the computer systems are however divided in many subsystems.

In past decades information technology has changed the conditions of organizations, not at least within the industry. Advanced IT systems have become a fact in order to cope with rapid changes in the market and to effectively manage an organization?s knowledge. When organizations became more flexible and customized expectations from customers and stakeholders also become higher. These expectations and guidelines are documented in a company?s management system, which can be designed differently depending on what standards the company chooses to implement.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain a holistic understanding of who are the consumers of fortified health food products; moreover to highlight what are the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to purchase these products. This thesis employed a quantitative strategy with an inductive and a grounded theory approach. The data was collected from a research company. Existing theories in the area of functional food were not possible to find. Considering that the area is new this seems plausible; however, previous studies provided insight for substantive framework.

Building Automation Systems in commercial buildings are often designed and installed by different contractors, using equipment and components from different manufacturers. The lack of an accepted communication standard has resulted in a few different standards. Many manufacturers of building automation systems only support one, a few or none of these standards, while developing proprietary system solutions. Regin, who develop such equipment, are planning to adopt an open communication protocol specially designed for building automation - BACnet. As a step in that direction this thesis was announced with the purpose to investigate the possibility to implement BACnet in one of their products and to gain more knowledge of the BACnet protocol.

The health care sector is one of the most information-intensive institutions in Sweden. Big investments in information technology have been made to ensure efficiency and quality within organisations in health care. This has led to high requirements in documentation and resulted in an increase in administration which gradually more often is done by nurses and doctors. A major problem is that it is difficult to gain access to the information recorded in all the different systems, which is their objective. This causes double documentation instead of being a support in follow-up performance.