There is an increase of financial integration, which can be seen in recent mergers of banks, financial institutions etc. in the European Union especially in the Nordic countries. However there are some weaknesses in providing consumers cross border services in the sector of banking, such as cross border bank account transfer of payments. The existing transaction costs do not encourage cross border services. Nevertheless a customer of a global or European bank can anticipate to be treated the same way in all of its branch offices inside the EU countries.

ProblemThe manufacturing industry is a mature industry where the profit margins are small and the competition is hard. This makes it hard for both manufacturers and resellers to gain market shares and reach reasonable profit margins only by selling products. Therefore Swecon who is reseller for Volvo Construction Equipment tries to find alternative methods and ways to increase their profit. An alternative source of income could be to develop the range of services that are connected to the ground products.PurposeThe purpose of the thesis is to examine how Swecon in southern Sweden can improve their offers of existing services connected to the ground product and investigate the demand of new such services.MethodThis study is based on a qualitative study of five of Swecons local offices and five of Swecons customers. The empirical framework is mostly based on personal interviews but in some cases information was retrieved by using phone interviews.

The Smart Grids development is driven by forces concerning safe electrictransmission done in an energy efficient way. Vattenfall Eldistribution AB has a visionto transform their electricity network into Smart Grids. To invest in Smart Grids theyhave a need to show their customers what advantages they will get from thedevelopment. This led to the formulation of this dissertation project where the aim isto identify products and services related to Smart Grids that will increase thecustomer satisfaction for Vattenfall Eldistributions private customers.The project started with a mapping of existing products and services on the Swedishelectricity market. From the mapping several development possibilities for VattenfallEldistribution were identified.

Upper secondary schools programme - a qualitative study about the collaboration of the Youth- and family team, the upper secondary schools and the police to prevent drugsAuthor: Åsa GöranssonSupervisor: Björn JohanssonThis essay discuss drug preventative work performed by the members of the ?Upper secondary schools programme?, which is a part of the Youth- and family team of the Social Services. They perform this work in collaboration with the police and upper secondary schools in Örebro.The purpose of this essay is to investigate and describe this collaboration. More specifically, the purpose is to study the contents of documents of the municipality of Örebro concerning drug prevention aimed at youths through collaboration and compare with the actual work that is carried out by the Youth- and family team through collaboration. Further issues dealt with are possible improvements and if the parties concerned feel a need for a documented structure concerning their way of working.I have used a qualitative method and I have interviewed members of parties concerned.

Denna uppsats beskriver fenomenet shared services, varför företag satsar på shared service centers (SSC) och hur de går tillväga när de designar dem. Studien har genomförts med hjälp av en litteraturöversikt och en fallstudie av TeliaSoneras nu pågående implementering av ett shared service center, FSS. Fallstudien består av fyra intervjuer och en genomgång av TeliaSoneras egna informationsmaterial och medarbetarenkäter. Litteraturöversikten visar att shared services utlovar väsentliga förbättringar av ekonomifunktionen och besparingar, att det finns en stor tilltro till dessa löften men att det saknas underbyggda bevis för hur stora besparingarna egentligen är. Designen på TeliaSonera FSS visar sig följa litteraturen relativt noga, förutom vad gäller placering.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to study students perception of the services that the library staff provides and the library staffs opinion of the students perceptions. With the concept service we mean the treatment, the attitudes and the qualities that exist between the library staff and their users. Our purpose is also to examine how the users experienced services quality. Our survey was conducted at an academic library with questionnaires to both students and library staff. We analysed the result of the survey by using three theories by Lundmark, Keen and Grönroos and Monthelie.

The aim of this essay is to examine different discourses concerning adolescents and library youth services that can be identified in the material. 73 articles from the Swedish library journal, Biblioteksbladet, were analysed trough a model. The different articles were all published between 1916 and 2005. The analysis revealed a result that consists of four discourses about adolescents and youth services at different libraries between 1916 and 2005: the library as fostering discourse, a new era discourse, the visiting activities discourse and the young adult discourse. The library as fostering discourse is based on the idea that the library itself doesnt need to change the service to adolescents, instead the adolescents are supposed to change into good library users.

The increased specialisation and complexity in products and services has created the need for Swedish companies to focus more on their core businesses. This has resulted in them opting to buy services and products that lie outside of their core business from consultancy businesses or other types of suppliers. When companies describe their offers in internal and external marketing it is done often in terms of company or service attributes that are not based on customer value or offered value for the customer. The reason for this is that companies have not adapted their services to the different needs of their customers. As a result of this, they run the risk of offering the same services as their competitors and communicate values that the customers either do not understand or experience as value adding. By using the theory on the data collection from the case company we have an understanding and shown how the customer values can be developed from a service company?s internal and external prerequisites and competitive advantages.

Research show evidence for benefits of breastfeeding and that infant-feeding-plans are supportive. Family-centered care is the theoretical framework. Family support is crucial for successful breastfeeding. It is important that society creates opportunities for mothers to breastfeed and contribute information and support by healthcare professionals. The aim of this study was to evaluate how the midwives and child healthcare nurses found that the newest breastfeeding strategy influenced their breastfeeding- and rearing support in the County of Jönköping.

The aim of this master thesis is to examine the attitudes among library staff regarding a music downloading service called Musikwebb, which is available in many Swedish public libraries. It focuses on the impact of Musikwebb on the process of music selection, the relationship between Musikwebb and the digital development in public libraries and what service Musikwebb offers its users. The gathering of material was executed through focus group interviews with library staff in four libraries. This empirical material we divided in three categories: Music selection, The Library and its digital services, and Library services. We use the results of Sanna Talja?s discourse analysis regarding the relationship between Music, Culture and the Library to analyze our material.

The use of subscription services directed towards customers has become a common phenomenon in a vast number of different industries. We have noticed a clear trend of new businesses emerging solely offering subscriptions, and existing companies altering sales of their products to become parts of subscriptions. But research has not caught up with this trend yet, especially regarding why it occurs and how it affects existing businesses internally. The purpose of this study is to examine the driving forces for change and examine how existing businesses have to change parts of their business models to offer subscription services. The premise of this study has been Vargo & Luschs (2004) Service Dominant Logic with their foundational premises and Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder et.

A common experience is that leadership could be better handled during reorganizations within the social services. The purpose of this study is to examine how social welfare secretaries experience their managers during reorganizations. How do social welfare secretaries experience the manger?s role and actions? While developing the interview questions it became relevant to illustrate further aspects: To describe how social welfare secretaries experience the reorganizations that they have gone through and their experience of the everyday leadership around the managers?; openness, availability, clarity, trust and skills regarding managing stress among their staff. The study is built on qualitative interviews with six social welfare secretaries within units working with economical social assistance in different districts in the city of Gothenburg.

The purpose of this qualitative sociological law study is to examine the relationship between the social services and civil court to apprehend if knowledge about the child's best interest is transfered from social workers to the legal system. This have been done by investigating civil court cases concerning custody transition from biological parents to foster parents according to 6 chapter 8 paragraph in the law of parenting, built upon the legal principle of the best interests of the child. Eight cases has been examined by using a method of qualitative text analysis and categorised into five primary categories and three concepts linked to sections of the law. The material has been analysed through a sociological law perspective, social constructionist theory and attachment theory. The study shows that a variety of factors interacts when it comes to determining what?s in the best interest of the child .

The main subject with this master thesis is to take a closer look on how some of the university libraries of Gothenburg have evaluated their electronic services (such as search-systems, Internet-based services, CD-ROM etc.). The information technology has made its way into the library field during the past century and needs to be evaluated and quality measured to ensure the best possible service to the users. Since evaluation of electronic services is a new area in the evaluation field, some problems has arisen in terms of choosing evaluation strategies and finding the appropriate performance indicators for the evaluation process. The main questions asked in the thesis are; - Which are the most common theoretical strategies for evaluation? - How do some of the university libraries of Gothenburg perform evaluation in practice? - How does the various strategies for evaluation apply to the context of this thesis? The results show that specific strategies for evaluation aren't used in the reports discussed in this thesis.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social services are applying the sections of the law concerning custody transfer within foster care. More specifically the aim was to find out what circumstances are underlying the social services decision to go through with a custody transfer within the foster care, and to find out which difficulties and possibilities the law offers when it comes to this process. The study was based on interviews with six respondents, within the social services, who have great experiences working with these issues. The study concluded that there are several factors which affects the decision whether to implement at custody transfer or not, and some of these are the child?s attachment, the child?s fundamental needs and consent from the involving parties in the case.