Background: During the 2000s, there has been an increased interest in studying business management and strategy implementation with customer focus in public organisations. To achieve business goals it is important to continuously work with strategies to meet customerdemands for increased efficiency and service. Purpose: The aim of the essay is to examine how to work on strategy implementation in a municipal real estate company from a management perspective in order to achieve overall goals. Method: The study?s methodology is a case study based on qualitative telephone interviews that were conducted with representatives in managerial positions from various levels of the company.

The purpose of this study was to investigate, through a qualitative survey, the need of knowledge and strategy in organisations today and tomorrow. The empirical investigation is built on a semi structured interview that was conducted on nine different companies in Gislaveds community. The companies were from three different branches namely: tree, metal and polymer. Three interviews were conducted in each branch.The result from the interviews showed that the globalisation had put the companies under hard competition which had made the need for rationalisation and effectivness more apparent. Having said this, the demands on the organisation and the individuals within it will constantly increase.

This qualitative case study, made with four companies, looks closer at how more effective information management, with the help of IT-systems, affect companies market communication and relations to customers and suppliers. Customer Relationship Management perspective is used and Enterprise Resource Planning-systems are the ground for new technology change. The main conclusions are that new technology affects the outcome of companies? relationships towards their customers and suppliers and that the processes and activities between the involved parties are more closely linked. Also involving your suppliers and external actors makes the information handling more effective and companies that do so most likely have a competitive advantage..

The use of internet is growing rapidly and many people choose to spend a lot of their time in the virtual world. This is the reason why we believe that it is important for companies to consider using internet as a tool to reach their customers. Today many companies, especially within the fashion industry, have acknowledged this and use internet marketing to reach existing and potential customers. Social media and search marketing are two helpful tools that can be used in order to make a company visible on the web, given that they know how to use them effectively. The purpose of this study is to examine how companies within the fashion industry can use social media and search marketing to reach their customers and what kind of attitude they have towards using these tools.

Background: Once upon a time the most important resources in an economy were tangible goods. Historically, Swedish company culture has been dominated by engineering and techni-cal innovation has been the focal point. Today, Intangible values drive product development and form a company?s differentiation. Intangibles have therefore become the most prominent resources in a company.

During the 90s most companies organized and adopted routines for their environmental work. This work included for example eco-efficiency improvements and the introduction of environmental managing systems. At the UN conference in Rio in 1992 the concept Sustainable development was defined, but it was not until about the year of 2000 that companies in Sweden shifted their work from environmental management to sustainable management. A consequence of this is that they now have to focus on environmental aspect in conjunction with social and economic aspects.The purpose of this study is to gain understanding of what a change of focus to sustainable development means for companies. Has the environmental work suffered in the competition with social/economical aspects under the new sustainable focus? How will the new way of working affect the balance between environmental and social aspects? Changes were studied in five companies by analysing their annual-, environmental- and sustainability reports and through interviews of sustainable managers.

Title: Information storage - A growing problem? Authors: Göran Svanhall Pär Truedsson Erik Ponnert Tutor: Bengt Carlsson Problem: Every day companies, regardless of size, produces new information that needs to be stored. In the information society of today, the characteristics of the information changes both in size and complexity. This results in higher demands on which storage solution that suits the company and their field of business. New and more innovating storage solutions enters the market, but are they necessary to smaller companies of development active in the IT society? Questions to Answer: Is data storage a growing problem for companies of development active in the IT society? How do traditional storage solutions manage the information growth of today? How urgent is the need of a new storage solution? Which features are prioritized in the future storage solution? Method: By performing a quantitative survey we delivered an inquiry to several companies, which answers will help us answering our above mentioned questions.

Detta examensarbete syftar till att beskriva, använda och utvärdera Getting Real som arbetsmetod under utvecklandet av en webbplats åt teknikföretaget Metop AB i Malmö. Getting Real är en arbetsmetod som är beskriven i boken med samma namn, författad av Jason Fried och hans medarbetare på företaget 37signals, som bland annat har utvecklat Ruby on Rails. Getting Real skiljer sig från andra arbetsmetoder på ett flertal punkter. Projektdokumentationen är till exempel mycket begränsad för att undvika att tid läggs ner på arbete som inte direkt har med själva utvecklandet av applikationen att göra. Dessutom utvecklas gränssnittet och designen först.

China is considered as one of the world?s fastest growing economies and the future of China looks promising. Even though the Chinese market attracts many new foreign companies to enter the market there are entry barriers which companies may encounter as obstacles, which will aggravate the market entry in China. As a result companies loose business opportunities and therefore it is of great importance for Swedish companies, which are planning a Chinese market entry, to identify which entry barriers that are considered to be the most difficult obstacles to overcome.The purpose of the thesis is to examine which entry barriers that are generally considered to be the most difficult obstacles for Swedish companies to overcome when entering Chinese markets and to rank the five most difficult entry barriers to overcome.Information about these entry barriers have been gathered from Swedish companies, which have carried out successful market entries in the Chinese markets, through an e-mail questionnaire.The result generally shows that the most difficult entry barriers to overcome in China were: bureaucracy, property laws, language, cultural differences and difficulties finding local partners. The ranking of the entry barriers? result shows that bureaucracy is the most difficult obstacle to overcome, followed by cultural differences, language, relations and access to distribution channels.We conclude that companies experience different difficulties overcoming these entry barriers, which depends on the companies? size, years in China, markets and if the entry barriers were considered controllable or uncontrollable.

Goodwill accounting has for a long time been, and with the implementation of IFRS in 2005, has become an even bigger issue. Critics mean that reporting of goodwill impairments is subject to discretion that can be used by the managers. We have applied a study made by Carlin and Finch (2009) on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm during 2006-2012. Our study contains 50 of the 255 public companies at 2012-12-31. The purpose of the study is to investigate if companies use an opportunistic discount rate when testing for impairment in goodwill and if the relation between goodwill and net profit before taxes, goodwill intensity, is an incentive for opportunism.

Account receivables tie up large amounts of capital in. Various reports show that the actual time for customer to pay their invoices is getting longer. This is a problem both from a society and a business economic perspective. The purpose of the essay is to find out if Swedish companies have longer credit days than normal contractual terms of payment and if so, can the business cycle or the geographical distribution of sales have an impact and does it make a difference if the companies have an active monitoring of the actual customer credit days. To answer this, we studied 12 listed companies in four different sectors between the years 2000-2008. In the analysis, we reason about the results of the study and how the various factors may have influenced the outcome.

In todays society the demand on companies to deliver better project management is crucial for them to survive. The higher demands from clients make older project management weak and unreliable. In the constructions sector more and more companies are created and the competition is higher than ever. The clients are aware of the higher competition in the construction sector. This has resulted that construction companies must now make their project management more efficient to create better projects and better relationship with clients. The purpose of this thesis arose from this problem in the construction sector.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the underlying motifs leading to the decision to appoint a supplemental liquidity provider and how they vary between companies. As the first study of its kind to take on an internal company perspective, the goal was to broaden the knowledge base of the field and lay ground for further studies. The study has been conducted by interviewing companies providing the service, their customers and the stock exchanges which they are traded on. The results show that there are two main motifs for appointing a liquidity provider, 1) Creating conditions for increased trade and 2) Improving the pricing of the stock. There was also a supplemental group 3) Other motifs consisting of the observations that would not fit in any of the main categories.

This study highlights the stereotypical depictions of journalists in film using a narrative analysis of four major Hollywood productions, starting with All the President?s Men from 1976 through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from 2011. Its purpose is to highlight traits given to journalists in the movies and re-occuring themes in the portrayal of the media and the journalistic occupation. Differences and commonalities between the films are concluded in a discussion of ethics, personalities and the media?s self image.

The aim of this small thesis is to investigate if the probability of business failure is higher at the time of divestment than at the time of acquisition for portfolio companies that have been subject to private equity ownership. The background for this thesis is the widespread critique aimed at private equity firms, claiming that they increase the risk in their portfolio companies. We have performed a study of 53 buyout transactions, involving Swedish manufacturing companies, covering a time span of 13 years, from 1995 to 2007. We find evidence of an increased risk of business failure for the portfolio companies with a short forecasting horizon (within one year). The absolute increase in the sample is however small.