Beef production in Sweden has traditionally been about rearing of dairy calves to slaughter. With reduced number of dairy cows and accordingly less dairy calves for slaughter, there has been a need for new forms of beef production in Sweden. In Västerbotten there are good conditions for beef production with a high feeding level of roughage due to favourable climate. The aim of this thesis is to, through interviews with ten farmers with beef production in Västerbotten, study what and with how much they feed their animals and link the results to production level. The thesis begins with a literature review where the general feeding standards and feeding recommendations for beef cows and growing cattle are examined.

The report is about efficiency of a current production group where there is no clear production flow and there are some buffers between the operations. The efficiency is done with the help of a tool that is calledWork process of flow production which is used by Atlas Copco CTO. The most obviously results are that the lead time drops from 25 hours to 425 minutes and that the balancing loss decreases from 85 % to 8 %. The report focus on decreasing transports, decreasing buffers, more reliability in lead time and quality. And a more stimulating labour content for the workers is another result..

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.

The aiming with this project is to find out if a small scale chicken production can be profitable, from day-old chicks to a processed smoked product out to stores and consumers. The products will not be available in the stores all the time because we will give the customers quality rather than quantity, so when the product can?t be found in the stores the customers will ask for it. The conclusion I found out is that it might be hard to raise chickens in these scale from an economic point of view the costs for transport, logistics, slaughter and marketing are to high..

Evaluation of machinery costs is necessary for selecting appropriate farm machinery. Timeliness cost due to untimely operations is an important component of machinery costs. Timeliness costs can be high for crop sprayers, since pesticide application must be carried out within a short time interval. This Master thesis investigated the timeliness cost and the probability of a suitable workday for spraying. Timeliness factors were estimated for four different crops (oats, spring wheat, winter wheat and barley) using historical weed trial data.

This study deals with the technical and economic feasibility of replacing the nuclear power plant reactor Ringhals 3 with a biofuel power plant. A technical investigation has been executed to determine which of the systems and components that could be reused and which ones would need to be replaced. The investment costs of the reconstruction have also been estimated. The cost of the electricity production has been calculated as well as the emissions of the new biofuel power plant. Based on the established rate of return, the lowest average spot price of electricity that makes the investment profitable has been calculated.

An increasing number of automotive supplier companies are investing in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in order to gain cost advantages. This has happened in a rapid pace since many of these countries did not have any foreign direct investments (FDI) at the turn of the century. The problem now is for how long these countries will be able to maintain the low costs. One purpose was to create a model of country advantages for automotive supplier companies when relocating further production to CEE. This dissertation was written in cooperation with the Trelleborg Group.

In order to produce grain in an economically rational manner numerous decisions have to be made. One of these decisions is what tillage system to use. The cost of the tillage system is a large part of the total cost in grain production. Different tillage systems result in different distribution of fixed costs, operating costs and timeliness costs. The price of the produced grain and cost of inputs also affect the best way to produce grain.

With the globalization, companies in the West chose to shift production to developing countries to cut down costs. This had a major impact when child labor and very poor working conditions in these factories were discovered and led many companies to take responsibility for their suppliers and the employees by adopting voluntary so-called Codes of Conduct.There is a subtle balance to enforce improvement of working conditions for employees at suppliers´ factories and to keep costs down. On the one hand, companies would like to conduct extensive audits at their suppliers to ensure code of conduct compliance and thus protect their legitimacy. On the other hand, audits are expensive so companies would like to minimize audits to keep costs down. Companies thus have to strike a delicate balance in relation to how many and what suppliers they choose to audit.

Competition of spruce fiber raw materials has increased dramatically in the last few years, leading to the fact that transportation costs in the current situation represents a much larger share of the total raw material cost. The Holmen-owned pulp industry Hallsta Paper Mill's location on the coast also constitutes a problem, because of the lack of raw material, which is much larger there, than for a pulp mill located in the hinterland. For a coastal industry it?s therefore natural to import much of the raw material by boat or to buy it from the timber terminals, in order to maintain good profitability. The purpose of this study was to analyze how the size of Hallsta Paper Mill timber supply area, without competition, with competition and with terminal use, affects the company ?s transport costs.

The purpose of this thesis is to map out and investigate how the banking sector affects a customer?s willingness to change bank, and what the switching costs are for a customer when making these changes. A case study was performed through qualitative and quantitative questionnaires and interviews. The qualitative part was carried out to create hypotheses. The hypotheses was tested in a quantitative survey to be able to either accepted or rejected these them.

The intrest and development of bioenergy and energy from renewable sources in Sweden has increased rapidly over the last few years. There are a whole lot of alternatives for those who would like to venture and invest in renewable energy production. Production of renewable energy opens up many opportunities for forestry and farming to venture a new branch of production, on basis of the primary production. Several of the new energy sources grows on farmland or in the forest. The opportunities exist in the primary products, as well as in refining and reselling, in the value chain of energy. The starting-point is the Farmer as an energyproducer. This master thesis studies the nature of farmer-own firms, who has invested in production of renewable energy.

This thesis has been made in cooperation with Forsheda Stålverktyg AB which develops and manufactures injection moulds and diecasting tools. The main concern has been their Trading-system which provides them with considerable amount of quality lost function.Focus has to however be put on the analysis of the Trading-system due to the fact that this has previously meant various quality issues for the company.This thesis treats quality assurance of the Trading-system, identification of the problems in the process and improvements of these problems.Quality assurance is carried out when a company detects that their quality based costs become too high. Quality based cost are? the costs that would disappear if a company's products and its different operational processes were absolute? (Sörqvist, 2001 p.30, free translation from Swedish). High quality based costs often result in increased quality problems, which can lead to substantial economic loss for the company.This work has resulted in a thorough review of the Trading-system whereupon problems have been identified.

Industries with energy costs as a large proportion of their total costs are greatly affected by the instruments deployed to cope with the Swedish climate and energy policy goals. With energy costs representing more than 30 % of the total costs, tomato cultivators are one of the affected industries. In order to remain competitive with other countries, a more resource- and cost-efficient cultivation of tomatoes in greenhouses is desirable in Sweden. Based on the concept of industrial symbiosis, this study investigates the prerequisites for a resource-efficient production of locally grown tomatoes in Sweden through the utilization of low grade industrial waste heat. The study is based on the foundry industry as the supplier of waste heat.To investigate the environmental, technical and economic potential of the exchange of waste heat, a comparative life cycle assessment, an inventory of the supply of industrial waste heat in Sweden, a compilation of potential technologies for the recovery of low grade industrial waste heat for heating greenhouses and a comparative life-cycle cost calculation were carried out.

This paper investigates the internal product costing system in one of the Swedish banks with the purpose to evaluate the quality of its product costs and possible implications on decision making. The study shows that the current system distorts product costs by, among other things, using relative allocation of costs and time and by allocating all costs to individual units of products. We therefore propose an alternative product costing system, which mainly draws on ABC theory but is also adapted to the specific needs of service companies and of the Bank. This proposal is intended as a solution in this particular case and not to be generalized in other contexts. We hope however to add to the understanding of why more complex costing systems, such as the ones based on ABC theory are, according to previous studies, not widely used in practice.