Background: With an increased global market, where companies seek capital abroad, the demand for a more uniform accounting standard has been raised. This uniform accounting standard is not yet available, differences between accounting standards still exists. Several Swedish companies seek risk capital in the USA and some are part of a concern that is listed on the American stock exchange. This means that the Securities and Exchange Commission requires the companies to do a reconciliation to US GAAP on those items that are considered material. This can be an extensive work for the companies if the knowledge about the differences between Swedish GAAP and US GAAP does not exist.

The business world has been through an extreme transformation over the past decades, which have forced companies to look at themselves from a new point of view. Consumers have a complete new set of ways to gather information and are more motivated than ever to make sustainable consumption choices. This change of attitudes among consumers has made companies focus on other things than price versus quality. A whole new concept has been brought up to questioning: environmentalism. Consumers demand more organically produced products.

In April 2008 an official report, SOU (2008:32), was presented. In that report it was suggestedthat the statutory audit for approximately 96 % of the Swedish companies was to be abolished.The report suggests that the new regulations should apply to all limited companies thatare below two of three limits that have been suggested: a) a balance-sheet total of 41,5 millionSEK; b) a net turnover of 83 million SEK or; c) less than 50 employees. The regulations aresuggested to come into force July 1, 2010. According to the Swedish laws that regulate thelimited companies, Aktiebolagslagen 10:11, should all limited companies regardless of sizehave an chartered accountant or otherwise approved. The purpose of the audit is to create atrust towards the figures that the company shows and also to act as an assurance towards thirdparties (Collis, 2003; Strenger et al, 2008).

Since July 2005 the major companies listed on the Swedish stock exchanges are required to apply the Swedish Code of Corporate Governance. The code states that companies shall have a nomination committee responsible for nominating new board candidates and seek to obtain gender equality in the Board of Directors. This paper examines the trend of board as well as nomination committee composition among Sweden's 60 largest publicly traded companies between 2005 and 2008. Our overall finding is that neither the board nor the nomination committee composition has changed to a notable extent during the period and that the share of newly appointed female board members has actually decreased. However, the trends vary between different sectors.

Many workplaces around the world use some kind of presentation software as an aid during presentations. At Westinghouse Fuel Service in Västerås they experienced that they didn´t know how to use this medium to its fullest extent. They wanted to increase awareness of presentation skills with PowerPoint among the employees, to improve their internal and external communication. A desire they are certainly not alone to have in the working life.My research studied how to design guidelines for the use of presentation software, so the users can easily absorb the message and find motivation to use the guidelines. In order to adapt the guidelines to their users, and thus create major opportunities for them to absorb the message, I based my study on the concepts legibility, readability and reading value.

Prioritisation of software requirements is a critical part of the development of software. Whichrequirements and in which order they will be developed is one of the main tasks that requirementprioritisation supports.There are different ways that a requirement prioritisation can be used, for example alone or in agroup and with different methods.The purpose of this report is to map out how you can carry out a requirement prioritisation alonewith different types of prioritisation methods and how you solve the problems that can arise whenprioritisting requirements. This is done by documenting the use of three different types of methodsthat can be execute alone. The methods are "100-dollar test", "Ranking" and "Top-tenrequirements".To be able to prioritise requirements, you need to establish which requirements you shall prioritise.The paper retrieves this information by interviewing stakeholders in the system and analysing theresult of the interviews and the execution of the requirement prioritisation.Three problems arose during that work and I present solutions on these problems. The problemswere 1) equivalent requirements when using the "100-dollar test", 2) low differentiation gradebetween the prioritised requirements in the "100-dollar test" and 3) that the requirements that wereprioritised weren't classified before the prioritisation, which leads to inaccuracies in the resultingprioritisation.The solution to the problems that the paper presents is to increase the amount of distributable unitsin the "100-dollar test" to 1000 per requirement, suggestions of classes of the requirements andthe combination of the methods "100-dollar test" and "ranking" to bypass the equivalentrequirements.The report is written in Swedish.Nyckelord: GoTRIS, requirements retrieval, requirements analysis, Viktoria Swedish ICT,requirements prioritisation, requirements, 100-dollar test, ranking, top 10 requirements..

Quality assurance for Scania engine componentsScania engines have become one of the world?s most renowned corporations in themanufacturing of engines. This is mostly due to the quality and performance thatScania have shown. However, this does not stop Scania from trying to achieve moresuccess in the fields of development and research to assure the quality of theirengines.The purpose of this thesis is to show how Scania ensures the quality of the enginecomponents, both those who made externally and internally at Scania, also inclusivethe manufacturing and assembly process.Three engine components were examined: D16 block engines, water pump andXP-Iinjectors. The study included the whole process from the step of supplying therow materials to the last step in production functional test.In this thesis an investigation of how other companies are working with qualityassurance was conducted.

In order to achieve comparability, which is one of the fundamental principles of accounting, companies should be consistent concerning the accounting policies they use. Only under certain circumstances changes in accounting policies are allowed, and when there is a change in accounting policies, it is important that the change is reported in a way that assures that the financial reports still achieve comparability. The purpose of this thesis is to establish which rules and recommendations about changes in accounting policies that exist in Swedish and German law and what their meaning is. Further, the purpose is to compare these rules and recommendations and discuss their differences and similarities, advantages and disadvantages. Since publicly traded European companies will be obliged to prepare their consolidated accounts in conformity with International Accounting Standards (IAS) from 2005, I also describe the content of IAS 8 which deals with changes in accounting policies, and discuss what the consequences of this transition might be for Swedish and German publicly traded companies considering changes in accounting policies.

Background: It is today common for companies to provide some sort of incentive for CEO's and senior management positions to motivate, retain and benefit employees within a company. This is in order to drive the goals of the CEO and management in the direction that is desired by the owner. Currently, the Swedish centre-right government has forbidden the use of such variable pay within state-owned companies. There are two different attitudes to variable pay, one that is in favour and one that rejects it. However most people agree on the fact that a well-functioning incentive scheme can be of great strategic importance for a company.Approach: has variable pay to CEO's had any effect on the company's profitability.Aim: the aim of the study is to compare companies who use variable pay to CEO's with companies that do not in relation to their profitability in terms of profit margins, yearly performance, returns on total capital and returns on equity.Method: the study uses a quantitative approach.

It is important for all companies to be seen on a competitive market. It?s all about positioning yourself so that you?re seen and that you?re are attractive for both customers and employees. A crucial factor to achieve this are how the brand are handle directly by the company it self and by the market. Establishing a brand on the market is not easy and it takes time to establish what the company stands for. To be able to succeed with this you need to have a strategy and a strong belief on the brand.

Today?s companies offer their products and services through multiple distribution channels in an increasing extent, in order to reach bigger markets and more customers. Multiple channels result in an increased risk for channel conflict.This essay is an exploratory and descriptive study with the purpose to explore some companies? channel conflicts on the basis of sales commission and price differences. A case study has been made at two different companies and the empirical material has been collected with qualitative interviews.We found more channel conflicts in the company that uses sales commissions than in the company that doesn?t.

Leisure boats of today have a lot of electronics that needs battery power to work. In additionto that electric propulsion systems have gotten more popular lately, which further increasesthe demand for high battery capacity. The batteries used are mostly lead-acid batteries and toget the most out of the batteries it is important to treat them right. To optimize the electricsystem it is important to have knowledge of how the batteries and the electric motor are usedand which factors affect e.g. efficiency and recharging.A new electric drive that can replace old diesel engines is being developed and needs testingand evaluation.

Many companies are currently working to optimize and streamline their processes and production lines to achieve higher profitability. In increasingly competitive markets, companies are working to find solutions to increase the value of their production with such a small use of resources as possible. A tool used to accomplish this is the Lean management system. Lean comes from the production system that Toyota has been developing since the early 1900's, The Toyota Production System (TPS). The Lean philosophy helps companies, by working towards continuous improvement in its operations, to achieve higher customer satisfaction, more efficient production and ultimately higher profitability. Many companies are working to implement Lean in their organization. But there are many who fail to implement a complete change towards Lean.

Consumption of meat and poultry has increased during the last ten years while the production in Sweden has decreased. Cheap imports are competing with Swedish products and consumers, restaurant and retail let the price decided what to purchase. Swedish food producers can become better at communicating the added values that meat and poultry produced in Sweden has. Social media gives companies a possible tool for communication in order to communicate and create a relationship with consumers. The rise of social media does not only affect consumer decisions making, but also corporate communication. The objective of this project is to investigate how social media can connect the farmer to the consumer.

In companies today, it is becoming more and more common for employees to work in a project based environment, as a result many companies have developed their own project models. Companies with a well developed product culture are striving to improve their existing models, and businesses relatively new in the marketplace are aiming to reach a high level of maturity as well as reach high levels of efficiency in the shortest time possible. As the number of mature and efficient companies with well developed project model increase, so does the level of competition in the market. Since a well developed project model often leads to a more efficient and accurate way of carrying out the project, which in turn leads to shorter delivery time towards the client. This is crucial as time is one of the most valuable parameters of competition in today?s business environment.