This qualitative case study, made with four companies, looks closer at how more effective information management, with the help of IT-systems, affect companies market communication and relations to customers and suppliers. Customer Relationship Management perspective is used and Enterprise Resource Planning-systems are the ground for new technology change. The main conclusions are that new technology affects the outcome of companies? relationships towards their customers and suppliers and that the processes and activities between the involved parties are more closely linked. Also involving your suppliers and external actors makes the information handling more effective and companies that do so most likely have a competitive advantage..

The use of internet is growing rapidly and many people choose to spend a lot of their time in the virtual world. This is the reason why we believe that it is important for companies to consider using internet as a tool to reach their customers. Today many companies, especially within the fashion industry, have acknowledged this and use internet marketing to reach existing and potential customers. Social media and search marketing are two helpful tools that can be used in order to make a company visible on the web, given that they know how to use them effectively. The purpose of this study is to examine how companies within the fashion industry can use social media and search marketing to reach their customers and what kind of attitude they have towards using these tools.

During the 90s most companies organized and adopted routines for their environmental work. This work included for example eco-efficiency improvements and the introduction of environmental managing systems. At the UN conference in Rio in 1992 the concept Sustainable development was defined, but it was not until about the year of 2000 that companies in Sweden shifted their work from environmental management to sustainable management. A consequence of this is that they now have to focus on environmental aspect in conjunction with social and economic aspects.The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of what a change of focus to sustainable development means for companies. Has the environmental work suffered in the competition with social/economical aspects under the new sustainable focus? How will the new way of working affect the balance between environmental and social aspects? Changes were studied in five companies by analysing their annual-, environmental- and sustainability reports and through interviews of sustainable managers.

Title: Information storage - A growing problem? Authors: Göran Svanhall Pär Truedsson Erik Ponnert Tutor: Bengt Carlsson Problem: Every day companies, regardless of size, produces new information that needs to be stored. In the information society of today, the characteristics of the information changes both in size and complexity. This results in higher demands on which storage solution that suits the company and their field of business. New and more innovating storage solutions enters the market, but are they necessary to smaller companies of development active in the IT society? Questions to Answer: Is data storage a growing problem for companies of development active in the IT society? How do traditional storage solutions manage the information growth of today? How urgent is the need of a new storage solution? Which features are prioritized in the future storage solution? Method: By performing a quantitative survey we delivered an inquiry to several companies, which answers will help us answering our above mentioned questions.

China is considered as one of the world?s fastest growing economies and the future of China looks promising. Even though the Chinese market attracts many new foreign companies to enter the market there are entry barriers which companies may encounter as obstacles, which will aggravate the market entry in China. As a result companies loose business opportunities and therefore it is of great importance for Swedish companies, which are planning a Chinese market entry, to identify which entry barriers that are considered to be the most difficult obstacles to overcome.The purpose of the thesis is to examine which entry barriers that are generally considered to be the most difficult obstacles for Swedish companies to overcome when entering Chinese markets and to rank the five most difficult entry barriers to overcome.Information about these entry barriers have been gathered from Swedish companies, which have carried out successful market entries in the Chinese markets, through an e-mail questionnaire.The result generally shows that the most difficult entry barriers to overcome in China were: bureaucracy, property laws, language, cultural differences and difficulties finding local partners. The ranking of the entry barriers? result shows that bureaucracy is the most difficult obstacle to overcome, followed by cultural differences, language, relations and access to distribution channels.We conclude that companies experience different difficulties overcoming these entry barriers, which depends on the companies? size, years in China, markets and if the entry barriers were considered controllable or uncontrollable.

AbstractOutsourcing is a business strategy that has developed over the last 40 years. Outsourcing means to let another company do some activity within the company, for example production.The thesis for this paper is: How is outsourcing used in a manufacturing company today and how is the resource efficiency affected by it? The research is divided into two parts, a theoretical part and an empirical part. The theoretical part consists of a study of literature. The works in this study is books, text books, bachelor thesis paper and scientific articles.

Goodwill accounting has for a long time been, and with the implementation of IFRS in 2005, has become an even bigger issue. Critics mean that reporting of goodwill impairments is subject to discretion that can be used by the managers. We have applied a study made by Carlin and Finch (2009) on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm during 2006-2012. Our study contains 50 of the 255 public companies at 2012-12-31. The purpose of the study is to investigate if companies use an opportunistic discount rate when testing for impairment in goodwill and if the relation between goodwill and net profit before taxes, goodwill intensity, is an incentive for opportunism.

Our report procedure identification of instability and disturbance in an automatic manufacturing line of processing and assembling of chair sliding rails at Sapas manufacturing department in Vetlanda.To obtain a stabile ground we have mapped the material flow to receive a comprehensive view and to visualise connections.We have examined cycle times at different stations in purpose to identificate bottlenecks. The result of our examination showed that the bottleneck of the line was the brush station. This leads to that the expected bottlenecks identificated by Sapa gets a delay time and by that a longer cycle time.Interruptions has a clear negative influence at the line performance so we have also assemble data through the operators report list and compiled these in order to find out the interruptions effect on the line. The outcome during our assembled period was that the reported interruptions corresponded about 30 percent of the total available production time. This has a clear negative effect on the line productivity and efficiency as we have calculated in order to get the present status..

Account receivables tie up large amounts of capital in. Various reports show that the actual time for customer to pay their invoices is getting longer. This is a problem both from a society and a business economic perspective. The purpose of the essay is to find out if Swedish companies have longer credit days than normal contractual terms of payment and if so, can the business cycle or the geographical distribution of sales have an impact and does it make a difference if the companies have an active monitoring of the actual customer credit days. To answer this, we studied 12 listed companies in four different sectors between the years 2000-2008. In the analysis, we reason about the results of the study and how the various factors may have influenced the outcome.

In todays society the demand on companies to deliver better project management is crucial for them to survive. The higher demands from clients make older project management weak and unreliable. In the constructions sector more and more companies are created and the competition is higher than ever. The clients are aware of the higher competition in the construction sector. This has resulted that construction companies must now make their project management more efficient to create better projects and better relationship with clients. The purpose of this thesis arose from this problem in the construction sector.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the underlying motifs leading to the decision to appoint a supplemental liquidity provider and how they vary between companies. As the first study of its kind to take on an internal company perspective, the goal was to broaden the knowledge base of the field and lay ground for further studies. The study has been conducted by interviewing companies providing the service, their customers and the stock exchanges which they are traded on. The results show that there are two main motifs for appointing a liquidity provider, 1) Creating conditions for increased trade and 2) Improving the pricing of the stock. There was also a supplemental group 3) Other motifs consisting of the observations that would not fit in any of the main categories.

Uppsats för avläggande av filosofie kandidatexamen iKulturvård, Konservatorprogrammet15 hpInstitutionen för kulturvårdGöteborgs universitet2013:08.

ABSTRACT This essay is about traffic analysis of Web servers. The purpose is to investigate if companies analyse the traffic on the Web server and if they use this information to create more than simple statistic reports. The questions that we will answer are the following: ? How common is traffic analysis on the Web server among companies? ? Is the Web administrator limited in analysing the Web traffic, if the company has the website on a Web hotel? ? Does the company uses the results they get from analysing the traffic on the Web server for updates and changes on the Web page? To answer these questions we made a questionnaire investigation by telephone interviewing the companies? webmasters. The extent of the investigation was 20 companies in Blekinge.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the opportunities of using social media as a communicative tool to attract and engage customers on different social media platforms. In recent years social media has become an important way for business to communicate with people both national and global. The idea behind this thesis was found when we saw different approaches of how companies used social media as a marketing tool. Through a qualitative approach we did eight interviews with six different companies and two social media consults which have given us a basis of what companies really want to achieve with social media. With these interviews we were able to analyze and discuss the abilities to interact with people and how companies distribute content that engage users and increase their credibility to the company..

Value stream mapping is a tool that is frequently used by many different companies. It is a great tool used to achieve the work that follows the theories of lean production. The tool is used, however, only frequent on the factory floor and the method is also designed based on this type of use.An interest of applying the method on administrative parts of the company has occurred lately. Administrative parts of the company refers to the part that does all the planning such as purchasing, receiving orders, customer contact, contact with factory floor and other work that is made around the actual manufacturing. But the knowledge about applying value stream mapping on the planning part of the company is lacking because the method is relatively new.In this work, a comparison is made between the introduction of value stream analysis on production and planning.