The purpose of this essay is to investigate how well vision and strategies communicates from division level to underlying business unit levels with focus on the Balanced Scorecard Concept. The investigation was carried out within the ANS division and two of its underlying business units at the LFV Group (Swedish Airports and Air Navigation Services). ANS is responsible for the air navigation services in Sweden and the production of the services is carried out of the business units AER (En Route) and ATA (Tower and Approach). With Air Navigation Services means supervision and conducting air traffic mainly within national air space. The purpose of the services is to insure that air traffic could be carried out in a safe way.The Balanced Scorecard was introduced for the first time in the beginning of the 1990´s.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how key performance indicators are being used as performance management tools within the production industry. Specifically the purpose is to investigate how the KPI:s within the telecommunications industry drives reusability regarding production test systems. This thesis will also highlight today?s cost models and suggest improvements of the KPI and what new ones could be introduced. A case study at Ericsson AB has been performed.

The aim of this report is to investigate how the work handling at the department for arriving goods at EFG in Tranås is working, as well as how it could be improved and made more effective. EFG is a corporation who process and sell office furniture. The company is working with a project concerning delivery precision, the subject is therefore particularly interesting from the perspective of delivery accuracy. The number of orders has increased notably during the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006. This has led to new demands at the department for arriving goods and the topic is as a result of that important also from this point of view.Interviews and investigations have been conducted at location since no written material earlier has been made in the topic.

Management control systems are a popular area of research and a lot of new research has been done over the past years. This development has been looking into new situations and circumstances, and interdisciplinary studies are being made to further understand the connection between different fields of study. A new field of study that has grown significantly over the past few years is the connection between management control systems and entrepreneurship. Leading researchers have proposed a number of questions for further research and one of them is the board of directors? use of management control systems in entrepreneurial firms.The purpose of this study was to examine the differences and similarities in the board of directors? use of management control systems between entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.The study was conducted as a deductive qualitative study through interviews with respondents from entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial firms.

Unhealthiness is not just a damaged back or asbestos. The fact that mental ill-health seems to increase in our society is well known. Statistics from Arbetsmiljöverket proves a fourfold increase of work-related disorders since 1997. These are primarily caused by organizational and social factors, 60% are considered caused by stress and a heavy workload. Sick leave due work related fatigue and depressions are scarily common today.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze two factors contributing to child labor in Ghana, one of the world's largest producers of cocoa. These two factors are: poor countries economic and political dependency on the rich countries, political leader?s ambitions and decisions. We will also describe and analyze the UN's efforts and measures to combat child labor. The method we used was a case study of child labor in Ghana?s cocoa industry together with interviews.

Today  Real  estate  companies  face  the  challenge  where  extensive  renovations  on  existinghousing built before 1980 must be performed. Conditions have changed and the housing need performance-­?enhancing measures that meet today's quality. With a current renovation rate,  it  would  take  30  years  to  meet  the  renovation  needs.  The  renovation  rate  must therefore rise dramatically, which requires the real estate companies to act consistently in accordance with commercial principles and in an economically, socially and environmentally responsible way.The  paper  discusses  renovation  strategies  in  four  municipal  housing  companies  in  the Stockholm  suburbs.  The  report  includes  surveys  of  four  ongoing  renovation  projects; Fastighets AB Förvaltaren in Sundbyberg project Hundloken 3, Stiftelsen Signalisten in Solna project Ritorp, Sollentunahem in Sollentuna project Svalgången och Väsbyhem in Upplands Väsby project Dragonvägen. The main purpose of this study was to analyze the practices of redevelopment projects.

District heating covers around 80 % of the heating demand in apartment buildings and 10 % in single-family homes in Sweden. In the year 2010 the total input of energy to the Swedish district heating grids was about 70 TWh, which corresponds to 11 % of the total energy input to the whole energy system in the country. Through the combined production of heat and power the CHP-plants often reaches an efficiency of 90 % from energy in the fuel to produced heat and power. In order to keep the efficiency high it is important for the owners of the plant to have good knowledge about the plants performance at different operation points. Strängnäs Energi AB initiated this diploma work together with FVB Sverige ab in order to come up with a program for short term planning of the production of heat and power at the company´s CHP-plant.The work consists of three main parts.

Testosterone is a steroid and anabolic hormone found in all mammals. Previous research indicates that testosterone levels correlates with physical capacities related to physical performance. However, these studies refers only to men and boys. The aim of present study was therefore to investigate the potential relationship between body composition, strength, power and endurance capabilities in relation to blood levels of testosterone and DHEAS in young female football players. Seventeen female elite football (age: 15,4 ± 0,6, body mass: 57,2 ± 7,4kg, height 1,65 ±0,04m) players volunteered for the study.

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of resource schools 1 as a human services organization and institution, based on teachers and principals? perspectives. The purpose of resource schools is to provide the students tools and resources to enable them to return to the regular school within two years. The study also aims to examine more closely how this objective applies to the studied resource schools in the studied municipality, as well as highlighting the success factors and barriers that exist to achieve the goal. Previous studies show that this kind of differential practice tends to become a permanent solution.

The purpose of my task was to map the pallet flows at Findus and put together as well as analyze the problems. My work has also included finding out what alternatives there are to the present pallet exchange system and suggest measures to reduce the problems.The problems can be divided into poor quality and hygiene issues. The poor quality, for instance poor strength is due to arbitrary judgements and the fact that there are companies that make a system of manufacturing forged pallets of an inferior quality compared to the EUR-pallets. These pallets are marked with stamps more or less similar to the EUR-mark and taken into the exchange system. Of course there are rules how to judge a pallet but these rules are many and sometimes indistinct and there are a lot of marks to keep track of.The most dangerous part is when the pallets lack the prescribed carrying capacity.

Volvo Human Monitoring (VHM) is an ongoing project at Volvo Cars where they measure, amongst other parameters, inhalation and exhalation through a device called Respiratory Inductance Plethysmograph (RIP), on drivers. RIP measures changes in the cross-sectional area of the chest and abdomen. When the driver is in motion, such as when she is turning the vehicle, the cross-sectional area changes and noise in the RIP signal may arise.The noise results in a large number of manual adjustments in the analysis of the RIP signal, which is very time consuming and the validity of the device for measuring inhalation and exhalation is questioned.The purpose of this study was to improve the efficiency of the analysis of the RIP signal. The goal was to create a new data processing tool in Matlab that automatically detects inhalation and exhalation from a RIP signal with higher validity compared to the previous data processing tool.In this study, nine tests were performed on drivers while they were driving in different scenarios such as highway, country road and in city traffic. Inhalation and exhalation was measured using a RIP, a pneumotachograph with a tightly sealed facemask and a thermocouple placed between the nose and mouth, which was used as reference to the RIP.The result of this study was a data processing tool that automatically detects inhalation and exhalation with higher validity compared to the previous data processing tool.

This papers? objective is to examine the effects that labour market institutions (LMI) have on the unemployment in the short- and the medium run throughout the new Keynesian NAIRU theory, but also to make a comparison with the postkeynesian capital stocks? effect on the unemployment. Thus, it is this papers? main objective to study the economic effects that LMI, capital accumulation and varied macroeconomic shocks might have on unemployment. The paper uses econometric regression models as a methodological benchmark in order to estimate each independent variable?s level of significance and to approximate the effect each have on the dependent variable.

This report evaluates whether an interpreted high-level garbage collected language has enough information about its memory behaviour to make better cache decisions than modern general CPU hardware.With a generational garbage collector, depending on promotion algorithm and generation size, around 90% of all objects never leave the first generation. This report is based on the hypothesis that, because of the low promotion rate, accesses to higher generations are sufficiently rare not to benefit from caching.To test this hypothesis, we built an operating system with a Scheme interpreter in kernel mode, where the interpreter controls the cache. Generic x86 PC hardware was used, since it allows fine-grained control of cache decisions.Measurements of execution time in this interpreter show that disabling the cache for generations higher than the first does not give any performance gain, but rather a performance loss of up to 50%.We conclude that this interpreter design is not an improvement, but cannot conclude that the hypothesis is false in general. We suggest building a better CPU simulator to gather more data from which to make better caching decisions, moving internal interpreter data structures into the garbage collected heap and modifying the hardware to allow control in the currently rigid dimension of where data is cached---for example separate control of instruction and data caches and separate data caches for different areas of memory..

AbstractAs a developer of database-driven applications you will be faced with difficult choices, when it comes to choosing database, server and programming language. For the result to be satisfactory it requires the different techniques to interact well with each other and also fulfill performance expectations. This is even more important when the application is deployed to the cloud and the response time plays a major role.This paper evaluates different databases and their performance. To test the databases there was an application made in the server script language PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor and it was deployed to Windows Azure cloud platform. The test applications task is to call and load databases by controlled requests which creates, reads, updates and deletes data in an relatively large extent.The results shows that locale databases or databases in the same data center as the server generates the fastest response.