In this paper the effect of capital structure on profitability has been investigated among Swedish companies. The essay intends to examine how the relationship between debt and profitability appear among Swedish companies and if the relationship differs between industries. The purpose is to find out how debt affects the profitability of Swedish companies.A quantitative approach has been applied. The selection was made among companies listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm, which resulted in a sample of 207 companies. Several regression analyzes has been formed, based on the independent variable debt-ratio and the dependent variables profit margin, pre-tax profit margin, operating margin, return on assets and return on equity.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to find out how information seeking habits and experiences of people in different generations affects their expectations on information retrieval systems like OPAC. Two OPACs are used, one web-OPAC and one mobile-OPAC. The following questions are asked: how can theories about information seeking behaviors explain why and in which way one seeks information? In which way does information seeking behaviors and habits affect the experience of OPAC? Which differences and/or similarities can be found between the web-OPAC and the mobile-OPAC? How does generational aspects affect experiences and preferences in an information seeking context? The theoretical framework of the thesis is information retrieval with several models about information-seeking/searching needs and behaviors. The empirical data contains interviews with nine people in different generations and protocols about two different OPACs.

This master?s thesis describes the development of a model of the catalystsystem aiming at control by an MPC. A well functioning model, which is suitable in control purpose, is important while emission legislation become more and more hard to fulfill for the car manufacturers. Much research has been done in the field of physical modeling of the system, but in this work a linear adaptive time discrete ARX-model is developed and validated.The systems tendency to change its dynamic during usage implies that the model must be adaptive. The developed model proved to be well functioning and shows promising conditions for the MPC design.

In today?s fast growing and closely connected society, a reliable and energy efficient transportation system is more than ever desirable. Nowadays the significant part of the transportation sector?s energy demand is supplied by fossil fuels.Improving energy efficiency in combustion engines will result in reduction of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. A modern internal combustion engine has an efficiency of 30-45 %, where the most energy loss occurs as result of heat losses in the exhaust and cooling systems.

During its lifetime, a road goes through a number of different stages; pre-study,inquiry of the road, work plan, documenting stage, building stage and operatingstage. The operating stage is the one that takes the longest time and costs themost. Those have a tendency of becoming unnecessarily high because the projectengineers don?t always take the management and maintenance prerequisites intoconditions.To decrease the management and maintenance costs, the Swedish RoadAdministration SouthEast has been in need of a work procedure that makes theroaddesign engineers take the management and maintenance of the road intoconsideration. This shall be achieved by a checklist where the most commondesigns that lead to increased management- and maintenance costs are compiledand listed.Through interviews with project leaders in management, the most commonproblems have been identified, analyzed and summarized under the headlineswinter-road, vegetation, road equipment and road designs.To elucidate the problem from several points of view, interviews wereimplemented with project leaders in investment and roaddesign engineers.

In this project the focus has been on the system for recombination at Oskarshamn 2. The recombining systems have on several occasions switched paths due to low pressure before the last ejector that?s feeding the recombiner. Of the mentioned reason, events and several measuring points have been analyzed in this report since the installation of the recombining systems.In order to prove theories and demonstrate what may be the cause of this problem, we used heat balance calculations by the program Probera. Using the program, we can demonstrate that the catalytic process does not reach the desired temperature with the amount of combustible substance.

Since long, Sweden has had exceptionally low calf mortality compared to most other countries. The tradition has been to keep calves in individual pens. With increasing number of cows per herd there is now a larger interest in more efficient and economical group systems for housing calves. However it has been noticed that bigger herds have more health problems and higher calf mortality than smaller herds. The early signs of disease are harder to detect when the animals are not fed manually.

In health care today at Uppsala County Council the daily work involves spending time at the computer. IT-systems were implemented to support and aid the care givers in their work. Around these systems there is a support organization to support the users in using the system. The aim of this thesis is to investigate this organization in terms of how well it works and how successful it is in helping the users. This has been done by investigating the flow of information trough the organization and by focusing at the role of IT-coordinators with responsibility for support, process development, education and statistics.

Background: Since the start of the twenty-first century it has become very important for companies to act in a responsible manner, in guides of CSR. The idea is that companies have more responsibilities than to achieve a higher profit for their shareholders. They should also care about the society and act in a responsible way.Problem discussion: Problems concerning CSR are that the internal part of the sustainability work has not encountered the same level as the external part of the sustainability work. Companies are today struggling with implementing CSR into their business strategies.Research questions:1. What does a company has to consider when working with CSR? 2. How can management control systems help the implementation of CSR into the organisation?Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to examine what a company has to consider when working with CSR and how management control systems can help the implementation of CSR into the organisation.

The numbers of mergers and acquisitions have increased significantly in the last period of time. Although this popularity for mergers and acquisitions, most of the mergers and acquisitions fail to create value. One explanation to this failure of value creation is, according to several studies, how companies treat integration of information systems in the pre-merger evaluation. The research within the field argues that information system integration should have a proactive role in mergers and acquisitions, meaning that information system integration should support the organizational change and normally be considered in the premerger evaluation. The aim of this thesis is to study issues that affect whether companies choose to consider information system integration proactively, when involved in mergers and acquisitions.

Denna uppsats har sin utgångspunkt i den tekniska evolution som har skett i affärssystemens värld. Syftet var att undersöka och beskriva implementat-ionsfasen av ett Enterprise Resource Planning System som tillhandahålls som en tjänst via internet. Fokus var att identifiera framgångsfaktorer för implementationen med hjälp av ett fallstudiebaserat tillvägagångssätt där tonvikt legat på intervjuer och andrahandsmaterial. Undersökningen visade att bland annat valet av ett för organisationen passande system, en omfattande verksamhetsanalys, implementeringshjälp av konsulter samt anpassning av affärsprocesser är viktiga faktorer för en framgångsrik implementation. Därtill såg vi att en tydlig projektplan, en Project Champion och dedikerade resurser också var viktiga faktorer för framgång..

Process standardization is a topic that has generated a lot of research and literature. At first, the focus was on production; today processes are used in all different kind of business areas.The aim of this study has been to analyze how processes can be applied on development businesses and how IT systems affect the result of the process. To accomplish this, we have asked questions such as what standardization is in a development process? Why are the processes standardized? What difficulties can appear with standardization? And how the IT-systems affect the result of the process?To answer these questions, we have preformed a case study on Saab. Saab is a well know Swedish company who are working with a project called the GMS-project, where they develop processes to cover the whole company´s business areas.The literature gives the reader an understanding of processes and standardization.

This thesis is about Swedish and Serbian teachers and their views on how literature should be taught to students in high school. The twist is that these teachers live in two different European countries, and work under two different educational systems. Three of them work in Stockholm, Sweden and the other three in Belgrade, Serbia. The purpose of this thesis was to find similarities and differences in the practice of teaching literature among teachers in these two different educational systems. The teachers were interviewed separately and spoke freely about their views and methods when teaching literature.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a valuation model of a Private Equity firm is interpreted into a management control system within the company's different organizational levels. A case study was developed based on the infra-net company Eltel. The management control systems developed by Malmi and Brown (2008)(1) was used to characterize the control systems at each organizational level. The building blocks of this system are planning, cybernetic, reward/compensation, administrative and culture. Miller and O'Learys (2007)(2) theory of mediating instruments and technology roadmaps was applied to analyze the mediating process of the valuation model.

This thesis aims to contribute to improved functional procurement of photovoltaic systems, PV systems. Functional procurement means that criteria concerning a function are set rather than specifying technical details or products. Possible advantages and difficulties in using functional procurement have been analyzed by interviews, simulations and a case study. Electricity production and surplus production for different scenarios have been simulated via MATLAB. The MATLAB script was also used to generate rules of thumb on feasible solar fraction for six different load profiles; a church, a farm, a car mechanic, an office, an industry and an apartment building.