The market is developing and a growing competition increases pressure on companies to maintain their competitive advantage. Working with cost savings is a way to enhance earnings in a short term but also in a longer perspective. Volvo Powertrain Production Köping has an overall goal; to reduce costs by nine percentages in three years. To achieve the goal, Volvo Powertrain Production Köping works with World Class Manufacturing where the Department of Processing Technology constitutes an important part.Volvo Powertrain Production Köping lacks a standard for how savings within the metal cutting tool area are to be calculated. This makes it difficult to control and monitor their business outcome but it also causes difficulties in controlling the tool suppliers? outcome.

Demands on businesses are constantly increasing and the competition in the market-place is becoming ever tougher. To gain the long-term confidence of customers, not only the best businesses, but also the best supply chains are required.Volvo Cars is experiencing a changing competitive situation and their retailers are having trouble stocking the right spare parts. Shorter product life cycles and the growth of Volvo?s product program result in an increase in the number of spare parts to be stocked. In order to adapt to market trends and meet customer demands, Volvo has developed the LDC model, establishing a number of regional warehouses in strategic locations in Sweden, de-signed to supply spare parts to the regions? retailers through so-called Vendor-Managed In-ventory (VMI).The purpose of the study is to examine Volvo personbilar Sverige?s (VPS) motivation for a modified customer-service strategy through LDC.

Målet med uppsatsen är att åskådliggöra vilka fördelar, nackdelar och effekter användarbaserad systemutveckling har för den administrativa delen av en organisation. Intervjuer har gjorts med en chef och en controller på ett större svenskt företag samt med en expert inom området för användarbaserad systemutveckling. Undersökningen visar att fördelar som ges vid användande av användarbaserad systemutveckling är t.ex. att organisationen och individen blir mer produktiv, får en mer flexibel miljö att arbeta med och blir mindre beroende av konsulter. Nackdelar har visat sig vara att organisationen kan försätta sig i en situation där de blir beroende av den person som har utvecklat ett specifikt system och kvaliteten på underhåll kan även försämras när användarna utvecklar själva.

Abstract ? ?Aggregate complaints in banks MIS?Date:                       June 8th 2012Level:                      Master thesis in Business Administration, 15 ECTSInstitution:                School of Sustainable development of society and technology, Mälardalen UniversityAuthors:                  Abdulla Ahmed Ibrahim         Alexis AnderssonTitle:                       Aggregate complaints in MIS ? A case study of Nordea BankTutor:                      Carl G ThunmanKeywords:               Aggregate, complaint, dissatisfaction, content analysis, Nordea, MIS.Purpose:                  The paper aims to develop a model of how Nordea Bank can monitor customer dissatisfaction through aggregated dissatisfaction analysis. Furthermore, the study aims to identify improvement proposals in Nordea based on the developed model and conducted interviews.Method:                  This thesis consists of qualitative interviews. Personnel at the local office in Västerås has been interviewed as well as Nordea?s customer ombudsmen, former office employee at Nordea, data analyst, head of customer inquiries, Professor of database technology and also a researcher in language technology.

The largest project at the AICG lab at Linköping University, Cognitive models for virtual characters, focuses on creating an agent architecture for intelligent, virtual characters. The goal is to create an agent that acts naturally and gives a realistic user experience. The purpose of this thesis is to develop and implement an appropriate learning model that fits the existing agent architecture using an agile project methodology. The model developed can be seen as an online unsupervised reinforcement learning model that enhances experiences through reward. The model is based on Maes model where new effects are created depending on whether the agent is fulfilling its goals or not.The model we have developed is based on constant monitoring of the system.

Problem discussion:To be competitive in a changeable environment, as the video surveillance market, in a time when the company and the market grow with almost 40% yearly, the sales organization must be well trimmed and effective. Knowledge about customers? needs and what makes success are essential parts of the progress. Sales Product Management (Sales PM) is a new group at Axis with the main task to support local sales offices around the world in their work with different sales projects. Because of the number of ongoing projects Sales PM needs to be able to screen among these and focus on those where their help will be most valuable for the company.

AbstractThis report is about the creation of a test system for development of a control system for a off the shelf RC-helicopter, which can be bought for about two thousand SEK. The test system consists of both electronics for controlling the helicopter and mechanical constrainer. The constrainer is used for mounting the helicopter so that it won´t crash.A circuit board including processor and sensors was manufactured. This was used for doing test of the different control algorithms. In this way were we able to analyze the quality of the sensors chosen, and what other sensors that could contribute to the control of the system.Basic helicopter control have been studied and presented in the report.

This is a product development project which has developed a prototype in order to facilitate for people using mobility devices when they want to buy a larger quantity of groceries. The prototype is a shopping cart composed with the upper part of a walker.Today there are many different types of mobility devices used by elderly and people with physical impairment. According to Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB) are accidental falls the most common cause of accidents in Sweden.This project has been using Computer Aided Design (CAD) as a tool to create a visual image of the prototype. The advantage of this is to modify the functionality and performance of the prototype on the computer before the modification takes place in the real model. Using human manikins, the CAD model was rendered in natural surroundings to get as true a picture as possible.

Background: As Porter?s diamond (1990) suggested, the business environment highly influences firms? strategies. Today, most of the companies have to decide their strategy depending from a worldwide business environment. Yet, strategy researches and the growing importance of marketing for business success also show that customer dimension must be taken into consideration. On some markets and in certain industries, the offer is much higher than the demand and then, companies need to attract customers.

Abstract: Hightech EU/Japan ? a research about European hightech companies? interest in establishing business on the Japanese market with the help from a middleman. Subject: Marketing. Problem: The Japanese market is highly developed and therefore interesting for foreign companies. The Japanese culture is very different from the European and this together with the long distance creates problems for European hightech companies to compete on the Japanese market.

This essay, with the title: Among children, laser swords and lions. ? How do we approach and utilize the cultural experiences of children? is an approach to participate in a scientific discussion in the field of cultural experiences. This text is an attempt to show the importance of paying attention to, how children express themselves, and place their activities in social and cultural contexts. By doing so and approaching children and their activities with an intercultural point of view, I can use my new found knowledge and use it to stimulate their future learning progresses in different fields.

The purpose of this study was to examine experienced family counselors view regarding the concept of conflict avoidance in couple relationships. Twelve family counselors working in different parts of Sweden was interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. They were asked to reflect on the following: their description of the concept of conflict avoidance, the consequences of conflict avoidance in couple relationship, gender differences and their own view on how to create conditions for constructive, therapeutic work in this respect.The result shows that the fear of conflicts, difficulty in expressing needs, different perceptions and expectations together with a difficulty to negotiate about differences, creates a lack of emotional and physical contact together with an absence of dialogue. The consequences of this in the long-term, a majority of the respondents perceived, are feelings of anger, resignation, powerlessness and unhappiness..

The traditional view of maintenance is machine-based, where acute maintenance tasks are highly valued. Preventive maintenance is viewed as secondary and less desirable to work with. The more modern view is to regard maintenance as a process. The machine-driven tasks are still necessary but are viewed as a part of the big picture.The purpose of this study is to examine how to high light general difficulties concerning maintenance management to aid organizations to reflecting upon their own situation. The study is based upon a pilot study initiated by ProcessIT concerning relevant key figures in maintenance.

How the United States anti-terrorist strategy is affecting the view of democracy is the main analysis of this paper. The mechanisms that affect the idea of democracy have been studied on the basis of the philosopher Michael Foucault?s thoughts and the main direction in French discourse analysis. The study is restricted to the period between the 11th of September 2001 and today. Information has been collected entirely from the White House?s website http://www.whitehouse.gov, including speeches, conferences and reports.

This report describes a study of how the teachers in Sweden are working with the dialog in their classrooms. The aim was to find out how the teachers are using the dialog in their teaching. And if they think that the dialog has a meaning for the pupils learning, and how they think the pupils learn. Even the difficulties whit the use of dialog in the classrooms and which in the classroom should speak the most was examined. The methods that I used in this qualitative report were interviews and observations of four teachers in the primary school.The research questions in this report were:Which meaning do the teachers think that dialog affects the pupils learning?How does the teachers work whit dialog in their classrooms?Who is leading the dialog in the classroom?Which are the difficulties when working with dialog in the classrooms?I found out that the teachers view on knowledge belonged together with how they worked with the dialog.