In the fall of 2014 a literature review and a scientific study of the topic; "... in the extent to which companies in the industry applies the evaluation of continuous improvement? was conducted at Mälardalen University. These studies are the foundation of this thesis.A strategic improvement is often divided into smaller steps of improvements at each hierarchical level from the top down through the organization. But if there is no response system that can confirm the results of these improvements back through the organization it is very hard to see if the improvements really are improvements or just changes and a waste of resources.

The attention on environmental issues has never been as huge as today. The climate is changing and more and more evidence suggest that the cause behind climate changes is an increase of carbondioxide into the atmosphere. The increase in turn is considerd to be an act of human activity. Therefore some companies have decided to become climate neutral and implement information technology in their business in order to reduce their emissions. This thesis has three aimes: to calculate a small company´s carbondioxide emissions, study whether or not information technology could help to reduce these emissions and furthermore find out why some companies decided to become climate neutral and describe the concept climate neutral.

In the beginning of the 21th century several successful companies filed for bankruptcy. These bankruptcies have been known as large accounting scandals and the largest scandals did Enron and Worldcom stand for. These bankruptcies arose without any warning signal from the auditors about the companies? financial problems and their inability to continue as a going concern. The bankruptcies damaged the reputation of auditors and broad criticism has developed at the auditors? inability to discover companies? financial problems and their unwillingness to reveal a going concern opinion in the audit report.

Since January 2005 new rules have been introduced from the International Financial Reporting Standards for accounting of Business Combinations. Goodwill, which is the difference between the purchase price and the value of the net assets in an acquired firm, should no longer be amortized but should instead be treated as an object for yearly impairment tests. Nevertheless, there are many companies making the tests but not impairing goodwill. The theoretical frame of reference looks at goodwill from its two parts; true goodwill and false goodwill. False goodwill is defined as a measurement bias and constitutes a certain percentage of the operating net assets.

The purpose of this thesis is to shine some light on how B2C companies in Sweden carry out a viral marketing campaign. Through case studies of two comparably sized companies, Arla and If Skadeförsäkringar, this was examined. This study shows that viral marketing is still a new subject for both marketers and researchers. It is hard to find conclusive methods for how to carry out such a marketing campaign successfully leaving companies feeling that they first have to go through a trial and error process. This is evident in this case study, where viral marketing is degraded to a tool for generating awareness rather than producing actual results as part of a holistic marketing plan and where those results are too uncertain to rely on.

How debt affects companies is an issue that has received much attention. The fact that researchers disagree can make it hard for companies to choose a financingpolicy that maximizes the value of the firm and its return on equity. In a world with investors that are seeking to maximize profits the value of the firm can be affected differently by different economic conditions. The intention of this study is to answer these issues with quantitive methods, with focus on year 2010 and 2009, where the value of the firm is defined as P/E and P/B ratio. The outcome showed that liabilities only affected return on equity significant in one of four cases, and liabilites didn?t affect the value of companies significantly in any of these.

Internet has opened a whole new world when it comes to marketing. Because of this companies can reach out to a broader consumer audience. The idea to write this essay came to mind, when we were asked to design the website of a new registered company named Artoteket. The company?s purpose is to hire out and market art on the Internet to bigger companies such as banks, law firms and industrial company?s etc.

Study objects: JM, Folkhem and ABB.Purpose: The purpose with this study are to examine how the supplier relations are in the construction branch and compare that result with how the supplier relations are for ABB a production company.Theoretical: The theoretical chapter illustrates important and relevant parts of supplier relations, purchasing and supplier strategies to give good overview. The theoretical review will combine information from different fields to consent with the research problem.Method: A case study has been made on three different companies, one of the companies was active in the production industry the other two were active in the construction industry. Data was mainly collected through semi structured interviews on each of the three companies.Conclusions: The size of the company decided which point of view the company had on purchasing, traditional or modern view. All three companies had a centralized purchasing organization but the construction firms were more decentralized than the production company. The reason was that the construction firms were dependent with more flexibility when every construction project is unique..

This exam paper has been a collaboration between the writers and SYSteam Utvecklingspartner in Huskvarna. The assignment was about finding a need for a mobile application, making a requirement specification document with design documents and parallel to this constructing a prototype. The assignment is summarized in the following questions:? How can companies in the forest industry benefit from mobile information technology?? How can a user centered perspective be used in the process of making the requirement specification document and the design documents?? How do guidelines for usability apply to a mobile application?Three visits to companies in the forest industry were made to find a need for mobile information technology solutions. After a small analysis of the different companies? problems and conditions the decision was to use Tenhults Impregneringsverk AB in the case study.We used the FA/SIM method in our job of finding the organization needs for change and the principles of User Centered Design in the work of constructing a prototype.The result of our work is a requirement specification with design documents and a prototype.

This paper accounts for the work with a website for a company whose real name will not be disclosed in the text of this paper. Instead, they have been assigned the fictitious name Larmbolaget, which can be translated as ?The Alarm Company?.During our work with Larmbolaget?s website, we consulted a selection of accessibility guidelines from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, developed by a working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, as well as a number of design principles and heuristics outlined in this paper. We also conducted several usability tests on users from our intended target group. All the measures taken were an effort to ensure that Larmbolaget?s website be as accessible and usable as possible.Our conclusion is that the resulting website does comply with the accessibility guidelines and design principles described in this paper, and thus we consider it to be accessible and usable to a wide range of users, including those with disabilities..

In recent years, more and more people have started to live double lives. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have created conditions so that we increasingly live virtual lives on the Internet. The gathering of people in this way entails both risks and opportunities for businesses. This study aims to explain how the phenomenon of social media has affected trade and service companies in a marketing and communication perspective. The idea for the essay came to us after we had observed how different behaviors in companies? concerning social media could vary a lot, and how we felt that this affected our personal view of the brands.

In relation to the paradigm shift that took place between the marketing mix and relationship marketing, and the emergence of information technology in the 90:s, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a frequently used concept in marketing. Most definitions and approaches have been generated from previous studies, but the concept is still criticized for the number of failed implementation attempts. Along a discussion of the area has an elaborate theoretical foundation remained as the foundation for the study development and utilized in all the sections of the study. The study, with help from Gartner's eight building blocks of CRM, focus on how Swedish medium and large companies work with CRM, and if this is an indicator of the number of failed implementation attempts. The survey consists of two approaches, qualitative and quantitative, to provide both depth and generalizability of the study.

Social media today is a current topic, it has developed fast and continues to spread in a fast moving pace. Recent trends states that social media becomes more integrated into peoples personal lives. This essay deals with the subject area social media, focusing on the channel Instagram. The topic is chosen because of it´s popularity in today's digital communications landscape, and also keeping in mind that there is a great lack of previous studies on the subject. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into how companies should handle images on the social media channel Instagram by testing two different strategies against each other.

The linear televison have dominated the supply of moving pictures, but this is about to change with the possibility to consume it via the Internet.I n this thesis we have studied how the two Swedish tv-network companies, SVT and TV4 are working with their web TV and if their online services have affected the linear TV. To limit the size of the study we chose two network companies that provide the most popular tv channels and web services in Sweden. To gather data from these two companies we conducted qualitative interviews with people at the networks. We came to the conclusion that SVT and TV4 doesn't find that their web TV services (called SVT Play and TV4 Play) are competing with the linear TV. They rather regard them as assets to broaden their services.

Globalization and demographic changes are forcing today?s companies to be more competitive in order to reach success. The increasing competition is proving a challenge for companies to recruit and retain competent, talented staff. To meet these challenges, Talent Management was developed during the 1990s and supplies a new and innovative way to deal with personnel management. Due to Talent Management being a relatively new theory, there is at present no generally accepted definition of the theory.