The Swedish system of environmental quality objectives is a so-called MBO, Management By Objective and has the purpose to guide the Swedish society towards sustainable ecological development. The system involves the whole society from the parliament and the government down to individual citizens. At the regional level, it is the county administrative boards that are responsible for the work with the system of environmental objectives. At the County Administrative Board of Västmanland County, it is the environmental unit who is in charge of work with the environmental objectives and they want input for how to improve their work with the environmental objectives, both internally at the Administrative Board and externally with external parties.The main purpose and goal of the study is to present the work of four other county administrative boards regarding their work with the environmental quality objectives and to identify external parties? opinions of how they want the County Board of Västmanland county to work with them in this matter.The work is designed as a case study of four county councils, where the environmental objectives coordinators at the four county administrative boards were interviewed about their work with environmental quality objectives.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how a distribution and sale-network for quality softwood lumber should be designed to fit sawmilling companies? business concepts, and at the same time satisfy customer needs regarding delivery time and quality aspects. This thesis work is a case study based on a sawmilling and retail company in Sweden. AB Karl Hedin is a private owned sawmilling company with 500 employees. The company?s turnover is 1500 million SEK, it includes 4 sawmills, 16 builders merchants stores and a packaging company.

Background: It is required that health care professionals continuously work with patient safety and quality improvements, and the skills of registered nurses are significant in this work. However, quality improvement also requires commitment and knowledge about how to improve health care and ensure patient safety. There is a lack of studies that highlights the importance of supportive functions for this work. Nurses in clinical settings can be utilized as facilitators that make things easier for other health care professionals who are engaged in quality improvement and patient safety. In order to gain understanding about the significance and needs of nurses with a role of facilitator, it is urgent to learn from their experiences of facilitating quality improvement in health care.Aim: The aim was to study nurses? experiences of facilitating quality improvement of nursing care, patient safety and multi-professional collaboration in health care.Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were performed with ten registered nurses who had experience of being in the role of facilitators.

The purpose of this thesis was to study how internal marketing affects service quality in the tourism industry. It was decided to conduct a case study on two hotels with summer seasonal employees. Pite Havsbad and Strand Hotell Borgholm were chosen as study objects. The case was based on interviews with the hotel manager at Pite Havsbad and the vice president at Strand Hotell Borgholm, who coordinates the internal marketing at the companies. The findings were that seasonal employees do not affect service quality much.

That an auditor brings good quality to the work he is performing is of great importance, not only for the company in question but also for its stakeholders. The information that the company disclose gets more credibility because of the auditor quality assurance. That the auditor tenure would affect the quality has been researched with different results, dependent on the legislation in the current country or region. In this paper we study how audit quality is affected of the audit tenure in Sweden. Based on research made in Belgium we have formulated hypothesis with factors that can affect the audit quality.

Abstract This is a qualitative study of elderly people's experiences of loneliness and quality of life. Also the relationship between loneliness and quality of life are examined. Previous research has shown that social loneliness is about when the social context are lost while emotional loneliness can occur with the loss of close relationships. Quality of life is about a sense of connection but also the quality of life arises in the difference between the expectation of what one is and what one wishes to have. This study has shown that the interviewees preferences, activities, social networks and low expectations on their life situation makes interviewees perceive themselves to be less lonely and have a good quality of life.

Nature?s Best is a quality-label for Swedish Eco-tourism. It is one of very few active ecotourism labels and the only one that claims quality as its main focus. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the certification scheme Nature?s Best with regards to the values the certification creates for the companies that certify their products.

The information flow is a very important process in an organization. It affects in a decisive manner the effectiveness of a task. It also has a major impact on the quality of the product or service for which the organization delivers to its customers. Lack of information may cause that important aspects are not given the required attention or even forgotten and can in turn lead to criticism from certification officials and lower customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study was to study how the information flow in Norrskog?s field organization is handled and how this affected the quality of the work performed and the feedback given to the contractors, The study is based on qualitative interviews with contractors, production inspectors and forest inspectors on all Norrskogs districts.

Abstract Tutor - Anders Richtnér History - Theories suggest that Lean Product Development strategies dramatically increase a company's performance through enabling faster T-T-M, Quality and Costs of Product Development. Purpose - The purpose of this paper is therefore to investigate whether the implementation of LPD actually affect corporate performance measurements T-T-M, Quality and Cost, in a positive way. Methodology - This Bachelor thesis is an exploratory investigation of the concept of Lean Product Development within a global IT- company, performed through four case studies, interviews and complementing corporate performance data. Findings - With empirical data and subsequent analyzes in mind, we note the following; it is clear that the project that produced the best results, in terms of T-T-M, Quality and Cost, also was the one furthest in the process of implementing Lean Product Development..

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate the design of the reference service and its development that Internet has caused in college/university libraries when it comes to the service provided to the user. I want to examine the quality of this development from the view of the librarians, and also investigate their attitude and how they deal with this development.The following questions were asked:? How has Internet changed the reference service at college/university libraries?? How do the librarians look upon the possible change of quality in the reference service when the Internet is involved?? What attitude do the librarians hold toward this development where Internet is used in the reference service and how do they deal with it?The method used was qualitative interviews. A total of six librarians from Blekinge tekniska högskola, Halmstad högskola, Lunds universitet and Växjö universitet have been interviewed.The theories and models used were ?media richness?, a quality framework including ?quality aspects of a service?, and social psychology and its ?reasons for a positive/negative attitude on an organisations change?.The result shows that Internet has brought more sources of information and additional ways to contact the library.

Sigill Quality Systems has been certifying beef since the autumn of 2006 using the brand name label Swedish Sigill. IP Sigill (the certifying system for integrated production) encompasses the values: animal ethics, food safety, free range and environmental concerns. Product quality is not yet one of these values, and there is a variation in the quality of Swedish beef. Swedish Sigill wanted to investigate the factors that influence product quality, review which of the present regulations that have an influence on product quality and formulate new regulations with the purpose of enhancing the product quality (sensorial, technological and nutritional quality). A survey of quality parameters and factors that influence product quality was done in order to establish a scientific foundation to work from.

The aim with our paper has been to get a picture of which factors one of the heterogeneous group that we've chosen of old persons, 75-90 years, in Scania, in south Sweden, have experienced to be of importance for their life quality today and what they wish to preserve of their actual life style when they eventually shall use the elderly care. Also how their individual life course has influenced their experience of the quality of life.We found this subject interesting as the group of old people in the society is constantly increasing and when the group becomes bigger, then greater demands will be put on the elderly care. We have proceeded from a standpoint that all people are unique individuals and that people become what they are from their life histories and from the choices they have made during their life. We have used the life course theory that says that one should see the individual in his/her wholeness and the whole life history of a person in order to understand him/her. We have also studied earlier research concerning the different determinants of the life quality.

Around 30,000 people in Sweden suffer stroke every year, out of which about 12,000 end up with language difficulties, aphasia. Behind every person with aphasia there are significant others whose lives are also affected. Studies of how aphasia affects the health of these people are few. The overall aim of the present study was to examine how significant others of people with aphasia perceive their life situation, and how their quality of life is affected by the illness of their partner. Spouses of people with aphasia were contacted through aphasia groups and the Swedish Aphasia Association.

Background: An accountant is supposed to secure that the information from a company is true and fair. Recently consulting, or giving advice, has grown to be a major part of an accountants daily work particularly in smaller companies which may have insufficient financial competence themselves. This means that an accountant occupies two parts, as an independent reviewer and as an initiated advisor, which have caused controversy. Purpose: The purpose is to outline and explain how the accountants and audit customers regard an eventual discrepancy between performing the audit and consulting, and to give suggestions how to manage this. The purpose is also to define what customers perceive as quality in consulting an auditor.

Benchmarking is an established method of working which is often used in order to develop the quality of the organization. However, almost 70% of the organizations with benchmarking fail due to the lack of planning and structuring of the benchmarking exercise. Maintenance sections in the paper and pulp industry are one of those who have decided to conduct benchmarking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain knowledge of how the maintenance sections in the paper and pulp industry deliberately structure and plan to use benchmarking as a driving force for quality development in the maintenance sections.The study is a hermeneutic case study. Telephone interviews and document analysis have been used as data acquisition methods.The results show that there is a lack of both planning and structuring in the benchmarking process, and lack of management commitment for quality improvements within industrial maintenance.