Prior studies have shown that earnings management can be used either to inform or to mislead investors about the future performance of a company. However, few studies have examined the impact of earnings management on forecasting return on equity (ROE). The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether the ability to forecast next year's ROE is improved when taking earnings management, measured as discretionary accruals, into account. This is examined by comparing a forecast model that takes the magnitude of discretionary accruals into consideration with a model that does not. The study is based on companies that were listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange during 2002-2012.

Umeå University currently uses two Course Management System, Moodle and Sakai (Cambro). Both Moodle and Sakai are based on open source code and are today the two more popular choices among Swedish Universities. They both have different strengths and weaknesses both from a technical perspective and a user perspective. This can create problems for a course responsible/teacher when it comes to planning the course structure at a distance course but also when planning the course structure on a campus course that uses a Course Management System. With this as my starting point my formulations of questions become:How do the Course Management Systems that Umeå University uses differs, both from a technical perspective and user perspective?What possibilities is there in the Course Management Systems to use a different Course Structure?Is there a noticeable difference on the view of Course Management System of teachers and students at different departments?The purpose with my essay is to create a basis that course responsible/teacher can use to plan the course structure.

The purpose of this thesis is to identify the factors that drive efficiency and effectiveness in technical development projects performed at A?F?s department of product development. In addition to identifying and analyzing these factors, the thesis also analyzes what needs to be taken in to account in order to implement a measurement system that is able to both monitor and control the identified factors.The thesis has been performed in a qualitative manner. It is based on interviews with people from several different technological companies, within different lines of business, all of which are customers to A?F?s department of product development.The results show that there are seven critical factors for project efficiency and effectiveness.

The research objective of this thesis was to conduct a holistic evaluation of an operational information system. By holistic evaluation we mean that an equal focus was placed on both the system system perspective and its users user perspective, in the actual environment where the system and its users function contextuality. In addition, the methodological objective of the study was to test a new research approach in a real life setting. The participants of the study were twenty newspaper journalists employed at Göteborgs-Posten GP. The information system NewsLink is a manually indexed full-text database containing all articles published in GP since 1994.

Background: Inter-organisational ways of working have become more and more common during the last decades. In order to attain efficiency and productivity, such inter-organisational relationships need to be governed and controlled. However, studies have shown that inadequate control is one of the main reasons for why inter-organisational relationships fail. One of the means that can be used for governing and controlling a business is management control. The use of management control in inter-organisational contexts is a quite unexplored area of research at the present time, which might seem somewhat surprising considering the fact that inadequate control is a common explanation for why inter-organisational relationships fail.

The care for the elderly in the municipalities has recently seen the need for a formalized system for quality assurance. Under increasing demands for monetary efficiency while bound by law to retain acceptable standards in health care, there is need for efficient and at the same time quality-assured management. The municipalities often solve this puzzle by introducing systems and standards influenced by theory-clusters such as NPM (New Public Management), TQM (Total Quality Management) or other quality management theories.This essay focuses on how the public administration in the municipalities defines quality and designs and implements system for formalized quality assurance. Our basic view of organizations is institutionalist and our theoretical framework includes theories about quality, NPM and TQM..

Robotic milking in Automatic Milking systems (AMS) is proposed to reduce manual labour and at the same time increase milk yield by increasing milking frequency. In order to increase milking frequency, it is essential to have well-functioning cow traffic. Investing in an AMS is a great capital investment for the farmer, thus it is of major importance to ensure maximal AMS capacity. This study investigated the effect of the traffic systems Feed First? and Free cow traffic with and without waiting area (WA) on cow performance and AMS capacity.

Uppsatsen undersöker den svenska marknaden för CRM-system utifrån faktorer som företagskategori, kundrelation, befintligt kundrelationsstöd m.m. Vilka funktioner i ett system som företagen uppskattar mest undersöks också samt hur faktorer typiska för mjukvara påverkar situationen.Resultaten visar att det finns ett behov bland små och medelstora företag för CRM, dock inte för alla företag. Många företag använder egenutvecklade system, kanske för att de kommersiella systemen inte motsvarat deras behov. Funktionsmässigt uppskattades grundläggande funktioner mest, och fördelningen mellan CRM-områdena var jämn. Gällande mjukvarukaraktäristik ser företagen funktionaliteten som den primära faktorn i deras val av CRM-system.Det är en klar fördel att kunna erbjuda ett system på det nationella språket..

Stress is commonly found in society today. This paper aims to examine how work performance, cooperation and team spirit are maintained in demanding work environments. By studying two departments in a public hospital that practises addiction care, our findings suggest the following: If the experienced stress is mainly connected to challenge stressors, it has a positive effect on work performance. By organising work through mechanistic and organic structure, the handling of qualitative and quantitative stress is facilitated. As a consequence, first and foremost cooperation can be maintained, but also work performance and team spirit.

The aim of this report was to do a case study at a geothermal heating system which has been in operation for about 5 years, and study if its performance has changed during this period of time. A literature study about the processes involved was also done in purpose of background knowledge.The tenant-owner?s association Duvan at Petterslundsgatan in Uppsala installed year 1999-2000 a geothermal heating system. The purpose of this installation was that they hoped it would lead to a smaller usage of district heating which would lead to a reduction of the heating expenses for their buildings. The geothermal heating system consists of 19 energy wells and 4 geothermal heat pumps, and it is one of the first systems of that size in the region of Uppsala.

The guest harbor on Utö, Utö Gästhamn, is currently using electricity for heating all of the water used in the showers and taps. Because of the large amount of visitors, especially during the summer months, the hot water usage gets very high and that is also the case for the electrical bills. During the year of 2011 the cost of electricity for Utö Gästhamn reached a total of 257 500 kr. Out of these 257 500 kr approximately 142 000 kr, 55 % of the total cost, were because of the water heating.The report is the result of a cooperation with Skärgårdsstiftelsen, the Green Islands-project and Utö Gästhamn where the mutual goal is to dimension a solar energy system, to promote the sustainable development.Initially the different techniques for the solar energy system are researched. The techniques are plane solar collectors, evacuated tube collectors, pool collectors and photovoltaic cells.

The aim of this paper is to examine how the design of management control in a retail trade company affects motivation among its employees. Our purpose is to identify what actions create motivation and how management can benefit by developing and promoting such activity from its high-performing employees. Motivated personnel have become increasingly important in companies today, and companies are increasingly reliant on individual employees? capabilities. The study covers all parts of the management control system, to see how these align to create goal congruence in an organizational context.

Today we live in a world where the demands increase in the aeronautics industry. This creates a situation where no mistakes are allowed about the regulations and for those who are supposed to follow these. Safety comes first, tracking of components, Service Bulletins which are recommendations from the manufactures and Airworthiness Directives which are demands from the authorities, these need to be updated at all time and everything that is done on a aircraft need to be documented.This creates a situation where today maintenance shops need to have full control of all parts of the organization, which creates a need for a working data system.The goal with this exam work is to evaluate the best way to implicate the new bought data system called "System Aircraft Management" on the basis of the needs of Täby Air Maintenance AB. The system are supposed to get started technically and also be implicated to the users of the system. This work will be focused to create a effective working plan to get SAM implicated with no interruption in the daily work.

More than 90 % of all business activity in the world market consists of small and midsized companies today. Recent studies have shown that there has been an increase in small companies? certification to ISO's management standards. Smaller organizations tend to have more limited amounts of resources at their disposal than larger ones. This can result in difficulties during the implementation process of ISO 9001.

This thesis examines the effects of proximity operators and query expansion with synonyms on retrieval performance. The queries were expanded with synonyms and structured with proximity operators where the permitted distance between terms varied from 1 to 3. The expansion terms were selected from the online lexical reference system WordNet. Initial query terms were selected from 28 topics that contained compound words and were chosen on the basis of their expandibility. The English morphological analyser ENGTWOL was used for normalization of query terms.