The purpose for this study is to look at the Pink Caravans, which is a Swedish travel company that started in the beginning of the seventies. The company today has a unique profile within the travel industry which made us curious about how they have managed to keep their distinctiveness over such a long period of time. We have chosen to focus on how they work with the market in this ever changing world, including aspects regarding for example the customer being more demanding today than before. We have also looked at a potential future for the company considering new trends popping up like the environmental issues. The study is based on a qualitative approach and a case study research regarding the Pink Caravans.

The  construction  industry  is  a  costly  business  such  in  respect  of  capital  for  most construction defects which then require rework, tear down and rebuild again. This study is  meaningful  awareness  of  tools  that  can  reduce  this  best  through  communication  and information sharing between the parties.  The  construction  industry  is  known  as  temporary  projects  organizations,  where  the construction  project  consists  of  several  actors  who  have  to  communicate  and  share information  between  them  to  avoid  mistakes  later  in  the  build  time.  These  actors  are bounded together thus for the duration of the project, then broken when the project has reached its end. The challenge here is for these actors to apply a tool that can help and simplify communications, information sharing, and perhaps the most important aspect is to  create  a  routine  for  the  association  and  the  shattering  of  these  actors.  To  implement such  behavior  using  a  tool  such  as  BIM  in  the  industry  whose  size  perhaps  is indescribable may be a very hard task.  BIM (Building Information Model) could be seen as the solution to this problem because it  acts  as  a  portal  where  the  actors  involved  must  sign  in  and  communicate,  share information, and eventually create a behavior, a routine for this association and division of  the  actors  following  the  end  of  the  project.  The  technology  could  help  the  involved from  the  beginning  of  the  project,  already  in  the  model  stage,  break  down  and  prevent any construction barriers when the building has been placed in the works.

Swedish sawmills of today suffer from unsatisfying economy with high costs and low benefits. The economical result depends on how well the sawmill can use their raw material. Iggesund Timber AB, a sawmill in the Holmen group, produces a large amount is enduse orientated products for the woodworking industry. Therefore the aim of this student thesis was to investigate the possibility of automatic enduse orientated quality grading of Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) saw logs by using a gamma-ray log scanner. Iggesund Timber AB has the possibility to grade logs automatically with TINA, a two way gamma-ray log scanner. Grading and classification of Scots Pine logs in Sweden today are mainly manual but can in some rare cases be automatic.

Today, maintenance is a big part of the daily life on board ships. It is also one of the bigger expenses a shipping company has and without any loss of quality tries to run as economically advantageous as possible. In the hunt for economical savings the shore-based industry has subsequently applied the use of condition based maintenance, CBM, were a component is maintained according to its actual state. This leads to a reduction of maintenance costs since no parts are unnecessarily replaced. However, within the maritime sector a periodical maintenance is still the most commonly used maintenance system.The purpose of this paper is to chart the factors that are the reason for the low implementation of CBM on board the Swedish merchant fleet's ships.

In the construction industry today there is a significant technological revolution goingon. New methods for automated processes and information management are developedcontinuously. Intense studies are currently taking place to ensure ways and means toembrace the new technology of BIM.At the present, environmental certification systems are considered cumbersome andchallenging. However, the increasing demands of sustainable development in the constructionindustry imply that the environmental certifications will not disappear. ThisMaster Thesis examines the possibilities to apply BIM technology within the field ofenvironmental certifications to streamline the processes.The applications that provide the best opportunities are:- To use BIM to be able to, during the design stage, dynamically evaluate the resultor score a certain building will achieve.- To avoid unnecessary work through collection of data for calculations directlyfrom a BIM-model.- To be able to automate certain time consuming calculations that are currentlyperformed manually.- To automatically examine the completed model to ensure that the demands arefulfilled.The possibilities to use BIM within these areas are however limited by the technologyitself.

Lately, more and more music festivals have emerged in Sweden. People?s desire and need to visit these events only seems to increase. Cultural tourism and music tourism has developed into a significant and important part of the experience industry and it employs more and more people within the tourism industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which effects this can have on the local community.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to discuss marketing as it applies to some school libraries. Today?s marketing is about relations. It involves the establishment, maintenance and development of relations with users, non-users and other library related relationships.

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.

Background: The global responsibility for multinational companies is a current matter of subject. Now when the world increasingly is getting globalized, economic growth is created, which brings a bigger demand of responsibility on companies. The leading companies from every industry is often becoming the frame for how the production process works and is therefore exposed to outer pressure which, for example, is coming from consumers and the media. Since consumers at present are more aware of what they are buying and where it comes from, it is important that the companies take social responsibility. We have therefore studied three big companies within the clothing industry to see in witch way they are taking their social responsibility.Purpose: Our purpose was to explore how companies within the clothing industry describe their work with Corporate Social Responsibility, code of conducts and where the incentive behind this work is coming from.Method: We have, through a qualitative study, examined how three large companies work with Corporate Social Responsibility.

Tourism is often being viewed as one of the worlds largest sectors and a great contribution to growth and development. There is a large motivation amongst developing countries to promote themselves as a tourist destination, since they expect the tourism to generate economic growth. The government of Thailand has been promoting tourism since 1960, and the number of foreign visitors has increased from 100 000 back then to 13.5 million in 2006. The purpose of this paper was to investigate weather the increasing tourism industry in Thailand has pulled resources away from other sectors of the economy towards the tourism sector, and in that way harming Thailand?s international competitiveness and causing deindustrialization.

Problem: Small companies dominate the skin care industry, and they also face moredifficulties, constraints and resistance in strategy implementation and sustainabilitywork than other operators. Still, the trend of sustainability strategies increasesignificantly precisely in this industry.Purpose: The purpose of the study is to contribute knowledge to the field ofsustainability strategies and motives for the implementation of them in smallercompanies who engage with skin care, in Sweden.Framing of a question: Why do some smaller Swedish companies in the skin careindustry choose to implement sustainability strategies in their business?Literature: The literature functions as a framework for the study and is considered toidentify the possible reasons why small companies choose to implement sustainabilitystrategies or not. The literature is collected before the empirical data.Method: This paper is constructed by a qualitative method approach. The empiricaldata were collected through interviews, by telephone, personal meetings and email,which were then transcribed and the interpreted by a model, which the authors havecreated.Conclusion: Smaller companies are often met by larger resistance and an until up tothe present slowly emerging industry with vague rules and controls as well as ancomparative knowledge of what is good and what is not.

Apple has since their launch of the Iphone series created a billion dollar business with the market place Appstore. Third-party apps have disrupted the mobile industry, attracted a high number of developers and set the standard for the industry. Despite success, this market has yet not been the topic of any academic study, a fact that makes this thesis important. Under the assumption that apps can be regarded as a service, traditional service marketing theories have been applied with the research goal to map existing business models, evaluate revenue potential and understand best practices of marketing techniques. A series of qualitative interviews with representatives from the difference business models, backed by secondary data describing the domain shows how the Appstore has evolved over time and which marketing practices that appear successful.

The banking industry is a fundamental part of the economy in Sweden. Despite its importance, the competition and the concentration level within the Swedish banking sector is relatively unexplored. This paper aims to examine the development of the concentration level in the Swedish banking sector during a period of ten years, 2003 to 2013. The examined banks in the study are the four largest banks in Sweden; Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB and Swedbank, and four selected niche banks, ICA banken, Ikano Bank, Länförsäkringar Bank and Skandiabanken. In order to examine the development in percentage change, there are six selected variables; loans, deposits and borrowings (both public and households), net interest income and return on equity, which are observed during a period of ten years.

Sustainability reports are drawn up for the company's stakeholders and declare the company?s corporate social responsibility. Consumers are one of the companies' most important stakeholders for food companies. This study is aimed to describe how consumers perceive sustainability reporting in the food industry and if the application level of the GRI framework has an impact on how consumers perceive sustainability reports. Consumer perception is described in the GRI principles and the basis is the ICA and Coop's sustainability reports, which are two of Sweden's largest food company.

Since the Bruntlandreport was published 1987, companies have shown their environmental commitment through an environmental account. Companies started these accounts because their rivals started having them and today most large companies have a environmental account or sustainable development report. The information given by the companies have been seen as slanted, and others see it only as a part of the image production for the companies. There have been several investigations of the stakeholders of environmental reports and it is not clear who is the primary stakeholder, in other words who actually reads them. All different stakeholders have different views of what an environmental account should encompass.