The construction industry has not undergone the same logistical development as the manufacturing industry; this, in combination with increased material price, leads to the fact that the construction industry must be improved. This master thesis is a part of the research cooperation Brains & Bricks goal of reducing production costs for the construction sector by 25 percent. Brains & Bricks is a cooperation between Linköping University, Peab and Katrineholms municipality. The master thesis aims to identify improvements in the flow of material, the Supply chain operation reference, SCOR, model has been used and the work has been carried out on one of Peab?s construction sites. At present the business is characterized by bad communication both between the construction site and the office as well as between the construction site and suppliers.

Summary Title: How to make decisions on software based servicedevelopment in the mobile handset industry.?The Rapid Model for Holistic Application Evaluation Authors: Per-Inge AnderssonPatrik Dreveborn Tutors: Björn Regnell, Department of Computer Science,Lund UniversityRobert Wenglén, School of Economics and Management,Lund University Problem formulation: Academically the questions of finding out what constitutes a sound decision base and finding out how to handle the issue of a holistic approach must be addressed in order to make a well balanced and relevant decision model. The core question is which decision criteria to include and which drivers are important in estimating the status of the criteria? Practically to provide Sony Ericsson with a formalized evaluation process for decisions on software development that is transparent, objective and challengeable. Purpose: Academically to contribute to the field of decision making research by elaborating on how to make a holistic, rapid and rational decision model.

Outsourcing has grown more so than any other sector of IT services. According to a research by the analytic company Gartner soon four of ten jobs in the IT sector will be outsourced. For a nation like Sweden that means about 40,000 jobs going abroad. Business managers look to outsourcing as a means of reducing their operating cost and their need for capital spending. Companies turn to outsourcing to save money and seek expertise outside.

Rotavirus causes diarrhea in young mammals all over the world, including infant humans. The diarrhea leads to severe dehydration that can be fatal if left untreated. The dehydration can be treated with fluid therapy and the infection heals itself. Despite the relatively easy treatment half a million children under the age of five dies every year due to diarrhea caused by rotavirus. Rotavirus sorts into the family Reoviridae and is a double-stranded RNA virus with a segmented genome.

AbstractA tourism genre that has developed in recent years is the nautical tourism, nautical tourism is described as a tourism genre that includes all activities in relation to water. Croatia is one country that has invested in and has good presumption for this type of tourism, and has also received an international recognition as a top destination within the nautical tourism genre. The purpose with this thesis is to increase knowledge about the nautical tourism development in Croatia, and to see if it would be possible to develop on Swedish conditions. Sweden is a destination with a large number of archipelagos, located in both inland lakes and along coastal areas. Stockholm archipelago is one of the world's largest archipelagos which has a long tradition as a tourist destination.

Image editing software offers unlimited possibilities to alter an image. Provided that digitalinnovation is not altogether positive, it is important to develop knowledge of its negative sides. Thispaper examines the use of digital image processing from a critical IS perspective. Throughqualitative interviews with professional retouchers, the study provides a picture of their ethicalrelation to the software they use for retouching images in advertising. Though, it turns out that thecustomers who order the retouching holds responsibility for what is altered.

The purpose of this study is to create an understanding of how a company selling commodity products works to create interest and loyalty among customers and how to stand out relative to competition. Based upon present theories within marketing communication, a comparison is made with actual market information to understand how well the theory can predict reality. The study is applied to the dairy industry with the company Valio as the bench mark. In total four persons have been interviewed, marketing manager and category manager at Valio Sweden, and also project manager and art director from their advertising agency. The qualitative data obtained has been compared to predications given by theory.

Because of the large economic growth in China there are many companies who have economic interests in the Chinese market. Also in the forest market companies have started to invest in China and the interest for the market is growing. The question is how the Chinese forest market will develop in the years to come? How will China?s entry on the market of forest products affect the global forest market? The purposes of this study are to describe production, consumption and trade of forest products, and China?s possible competitive advantage in the forest industry. The purpose of this study is also to describe how China?s entry on the forest market affects the world market of forest products.

This study uses European researcher Tomas Valasek?s hypothesis about factors required for defence cooperation in order to achieve conditions which can be successfully applied to the Nordic defence cooperation NORDEFCO. The study uses only Norway and Sweden on the grounds that they are the original actors and the driving forces behind the defence cooperation. The factors studied are; the countries' strategic culture, solidarity and trust between countries, similarity in military forces, if similar conditions prevail in the defence industry and if the intentions of cooperation have been clarified.Mainly government documents in the form of propositions, orientations and defence documents are studied, together with previous research in this area and, especially, interviews with representatives of NORDEFCO at military level and policy level as well as outside perspectives from the military attachés in each country. With the intention of studying the extent to which the factors Valasek features may prove to be significant in assessing the conditions for enhanced cooperation in NORDEFCO, the study raises the question of how it is possible to find expressions for the factors.

The textile business is one of the oldest industries of our time, and it employs nearly 1.4 million workers within the European Union alone. It is not unusual that this is the foundation of a country?s industrialisation. Even though the industry brings many positive factors, there are also negative factors that will influence the industry?s growth in the future.

For many years, the construction industry in Sweden has not developed much of an integral approach for design across disciplines. The sector?s impact on society, economics and environment is huge. To make the interactions within the construction industry more efficient, a relatively new concept called BIM (Building Information Modeling) has been introduced. The idea with BIM is that the different actors of the construction industry will work through intelligent CAD software, with common file formats and more cooperation between different actors during the various steps of the building and construction process.The technical consultancy company WSP Sweden is working actively to implement BIM within the frame of its activities.

The aim of this study is to look at censorship and attempted censorship of books about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) people in public libraries in the USA. People from the public can submit formal challenges to a book at the library when they find the material offensive which can lead to those books being taken away from the library shelves. The questions asked are why GLBT- literature is being challenged, and sometimes banned, and how do the libraries deal with the challenges to the books.It is nowadays the people from the public, rather than the government or the librarians that are behind many cases of removal of books with homosexual themes. The study presents some of the fictional GLBT- literature that has been cause for much controversy in the USA. All the five examples mentioned are children?s books concerning GLBT- themes and are among the most challenged books in American libraries in the past twenty years.

This paper examines family owned tourism businesses with a special focus on succession. In Nordic countries tourism has been widely promoted and used in rural development as a replacement economy for ?traditional? livelihoods based on rural production. Because the tourism and hospitality industry, especially in rural areas, is dominated by family enterprises, the topic of succession is of great relevance for tourism and tourism destinations. This paper looks at family businesses? special characteristics, challenges and advantages in terms of ownership structure, lifestyle, motivations, employees and destination impact.

One of the most distinguishing features of contemporary globalisation is production fragmentation, a splitting up of the manufacturing of a good into several different stages. Production fragmentation creates new opportunities through vertical specialization; a country incapable of mastering the entire production process may specialize in the manufacturing of one separate part. The aim of this thesis is to examine to what extent international integration affects a country?s ability to engage in vertical specialization in an industry characterized by production fragmentation. The analysis focuses on the european integration process over the last decade, where countries in eastern Europe with relatively low labour costs have been integrated with more capital abundant western economies.

During the last 20 years, the Swedish health care system has faced major changes. One of them is the increasing pressure to generate economic profit due to private businesses entering the market. Health care units are forced to make some structural changes in order to become effective and efficient. As a result merger and acquisitions has become a part of the health care sector, and seems to be an increasing phenomenon. Mergers and acquisitions have mainly been studied in the industry.