Visualization plays a key role in the concept of Lean. Lean was developed in Japan as a business philosophy in order to lead to an activity, where only steps that contribute to customer value of the final product are being performed. By defining the customer value and establish visualized standards, it is possible to see when situations differ from the standard. Then it?s possible to lead the process back on track.

 This thesis aims to through certain parts of the brand equity investigate the trust of consumers for a brand that recently experienced a product-harm crisis. It also wants to investigate why this trust exist, if it does. Structured interviews were carried out at 60 respondents in Uppsala. The results show that the respondents have positive associations with ICA, they think that ICA maintains a high quality on their products and services and that 50% more often choose to do their grocery shopping at ICA. The conclusion of the study is that ICA has a strong brand equity resulting in brand trust from consumers, which is founded in the brand reliability and brand intentions of the company. .

The usage time is an important part of the specification for products powered bybatteries. The usage time is affected by a number of different elements; technical,environmental and how the product is being used. The method to determine theusage time is intended to define how measurements and calculations are to berealized along with influencing factors to keep in mind. With support from thismethod the intention is to gain control on how well the established usage time canbe expected to cohere with the real value and what affects the value.The study is done specifically for hearing protectors with battery powered built inelectronically functions. The functions can be level dependent function forambient hearing, 2-way radio communication, Bluetooth or FM-radio.The first chapter of the report describes the literature study performed in theproject.

Biogas is a renewable fuel that can be extracted from anaerobic digestion of many differentsubstrates, for example biological household waste. An alternative handling of the waste is tomix it with other wastes and incinerate it in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant. Thisstudy uses life cycle assessment to investigate which type of waste handling that is betterfrom an environmental point of view, anaerobic digestion with biogas production orincineration. The results are based on a case study of a biogas production plant owned by thecompany Ragn-Sells in Vänersborg. The alternative is incineration at a CHP plant inGothenburg.

Målet med detta examensarbete var att utvärdera produktutvecklingsmetoden Needfinding genom att studera tillgänglig litteratur och genom att implementera denna metod i ett praktiskt fall. Sättet detta genomfördes på var att påbörja arbetet utan någon given problemställning. Detta innebar att första delen av arbetet användes för att klarlägga och konkretisera ett sådant. Sedan kunde utvecklingsarbetet påbörjas för att hitta lösningar till de belysta problemen. Fokus lades slutligen på varuhanteringen inom dagligvaruhandeln där både ergonomiska och miljömässiga förbättringar skulle kunna genomföras..

At the end of 2008, Arla concluded agreements with several supermarkets in southern Sweden. The agreement with the supermarkets excluded Ska?nemejerier from the stores. This meant that Ska?nemejerier lost approximately 7% of sales volume.

This master of science thesis intends to examine how the established innovation theoriesinteracts with the social and cultural phenomena arising from the reduction in communicationcosts as a result of the development of the internet.The aim is to present a knowledge inventory of attitudes to and experiences of an openapproach, with emphasis on collaborative innovation, in product and service developmentdriven companies in different fields. The studied theories and the empirical results forms thebasis for an analysis of how companies can benefit from the diversified knowledge that existsoutside their borders as well as an exploration of the potential for this kind of knowledgeexchange to act as a catalyst for innovation.The theoretical part of the study is based essentially on two tracks: (1) innovation theories witha focus onopen innovation and user innovation, and (2) a broad review of how theories ofdiversified knowledgeand collective intelligence has become possible to apply in an innovationcontext. The empirical part of the study is based on material obtained from semi-structuredinterviews with respondents from six companies.The results show that companies have implemented unstructured innovation initiatives withoutany formal links to the structured product development processes, which are part of thecompanies core activities. The main conclusions include the following insights: There is a needfor structured links between the unstructured initiatives and the core activities, which makes itpossible to take promising ideas to market. The companies also have to lose some control of theunstructured initiatives; consequently it is impossible to pinpoint what the outcome will be.

The Swedish stock-market gives investors an opportunity to benefit from the global growth while financing companies invests and contributes to a socio-economic development. Parallel to the ownership of the funds also follows a responsibility as companies in the funds affect society and the environment. The growth of savings in funds, combined with an increased focus on sustainability has developed SRI (socially responsible investment). Therefore it is interesting to examine whether responsibility is an exception, which only concerns SRI-funds or a general principle, which includes the whole Swedish stock-market.The results of the survey makes it clear that all the Swedish major banks actively works to integrate sustainability within the respective bank's business to achieve a more sustainable financial system. Thus concludes the investigation that responsible investments are a general principle on the Swedish mutual stock-market.How responsibility is integrated in fund management differ between the banks.

Bactiguard is a Swedish company within the field of medichal technology. The company has been very prosperous since it was founded in 2005 and was electedÅrets MedTechföretag 2008 ?MedTech Company of the year 2008. According to a definition by NUTEK, Bactiguard is still considered a minor company ? despite high market value and international expansion.

This report presents thesis of Liisa Kokkonen in collaboration with Muovikilpi Oy.The project?s goal is to find a new construction for an existing lamp made of acrylic. Form and design retains and the manufacturing occurs at Muovikilpi Oy. The project contains the new construction and manufacturing of the lamp and also a proposition for a set with floor and wall lamp.  The paper gives an outline of acrylic as material and how it reacts with light.

This thesis has been carried out at the Building and Civil Engineering Programme at Chalmers University of Technology in cooperation with NCC Technology. The study aims to investigate the optimal design of a library of standardized structural solutions for in-house multi-family buildings and what benefits it brings. Today NCC use technology platforms to improve efficiency and simplify the construction process. The platforms provide the constructors guidelines on how construction details should look like, but the details are not complete. NCC Technology started in the spring of 2013 a project to investigate what benefits there are to create a library of standardized structural solutions for the constructors, with more detailed solutions than in the platforms.

The concept of art infusion has become more and more used in the field of marketing and product advertising, and the phenomenon has been subject to research. The purpose of this paper is to study how the perception of an office environment is influenced by different kinds of art settings. The study is made as a survey in which the respondents have been exposed to working environments, only differentiated by the existence of different kinds of art or non-existence of art in the presentation. There are many conclusions to draw from the study, the most important is that the presence of art gives positive spillover effects on the surrounding environment..

Background and problemThe Swedish mobile market is highly competitive despite the oligopoly that currently exists. A short product life cycle together with fads and new innovations puts pressure on the operators to respond to the ever changing environment and to develop and adapt their strategies after it.As a previous study regarding a specific operator?s strategy was cancelled due to the extensive confidentiality surrounding it, an interest was sparked to perform an industry analysis as this is clearly something the actors spend a great deal of time on developing. The launch of the 4G network will offer new opportunities for the operators regarding products services. It may also impact the competition on the overall market.PurposeThe purpose of this thesis is to present a deep analysis of the industry and give the reader a comprehensive picture of existing conditions.

The most dominating type of company in Sweden is the small-sized business and it usually lacks its own marketing department. The purpose of this paper was to analyze several small Swedish businesses which are specialized in different sectors of the Mechanic/Technology industry but they are similar in terms of having niched products and they are leading companies in the world. The objective was to do research about how small businesses work with marketing despite its lack of resources and capital.This survey has shown that customer contacts, customer relationships and especially for those investigated companies, it was very important to focus on globalization and product development in order to build a Point of Difference..

In today?s computerized society more and more companies choose to utilize new applications that can ease the way of handling the information. For many of us is imperative that the process as efficient as possible if one takes in consideration the size of savings that this new application can bring.The developer of the evaluated system is SYSteam AB Huskvarna and they are the ones that gave us this assignment. The application that we evaluate is SCM (Secure Connection Manager). It is already used today by big companies such as Telia and Ericsson to search for errors in telephone servers placed all over the country.