Efficiency has become an important objective for many providers of welfare services. Among Swedish schools, both private and public, increased administrative demands seemingly influence operations, and affect teachers negatively through perceived stress. Simultaneously, Swedish students scored an all-time low in the latest PISA survey, and are now performing below the OECD-average in science, mathematics and reading. A central administrative task in the Swedish elementary school is the parent-teacher conference, which is an important activity in supporting the development of the student's knowledge and social skills. Lean is a well-established operations framework, which has proven successful in order to improve process efficiency.

This master's theses was carried out on assignment from Stockholm Vatten AB as a part of a project developing new waste water treatment techniques. The goal of the theisis has been to evaluate an anaerobic membrane bioreactor for treatment of waste water from Hammarby Sjöstad. The bioreactor has not been heated and the main interest has been to study the gas production, power consumption and the reduction of organic matter and nutrients.The system has been completed with a reverse osmosis unit and a total of four batch runs have been made with good results. The use of reverse osmosis allows nutrient in the waste water to be reintroduced into circulation as the reverse osmosis concentrate can be used as crop nutrient.The membrane unit is of VSEP ("Vibratory Shear Enhanced Processing") type and an extensive membrane test has been conducted. This so called L-test helped determine the most suitable type of membrane for the system to allow a higher ±ux and thus lower power consumption.

Most companies have a bottleneck in their production, that is a constraining re-source. When the demand is higher than the capacity in the constraining resource it is impossible to produce the demanded output. This problem leads to delayed deliveries, unhappy customers and ultimately to decreased revenue. Bottlenecks therefore has a significant role in production and must be handled thereof.MW Power in Sävsjö, Sweden designs and manufactures water and steam boilers for the customer's unique needs. MW Power invested in a new plasma cutting ma-chine but the machine has not reached the expected capacity.

Time studies in dairy production are an essential tool when deciding about level of mechanisation and automatisation both in investment situation and improving efficiency in existing operations. In previous investigations such studies have been carried out during normal barn conditions during winter. Since there is a compulsory to have dairy cows grazing 3 to 5 months during summer time in Sweden time studies during this season is important to have a full picture of needed working time. During grazing season time studies was carried out at 14 dairy farms representing herd sizes from 66 to 450 dairy cows of which 6 farms with AMS. 8 farms were the same as studied during winter season.

Today it is common to have adult horses stabled for most of the day. This limits the horses? ability to perform some of their natural behaviors such as foraging and movement. The purpose of this review was to compare the feral horses? diurnal rhythm and time budget with stabled horses.

The thesis has investigated how Sandvik Coromant could implement the SMED principle on one of their grinders groups and what improvements it would lead to. The aim of the thesis is to identify the current situation and investigate how their setup times would be affected by SMED. The work initiated with a literature analysis about the SMED principles and then proceeded with an analysis of the current situation where the activity was time mapped. The analysis consisted of time trials of the process that the thesis would include. The time studies revealed opportunities for structural improvements to create environment for a more structured process.

This report is the result of a thesis performed at Westermo Industrial Ltd with its headquarters in Stora Sundby and it sums up the author's studies for University Engineering in Innovation, Production and Logistics at Mälardalen University.The main goal of the thesis was to identify problems and suggest actions that lead to the reduction of the repair time from 3 weeks to 2 weeks. The key questions that were answered in order to achieve the thesis objectives are: What are the biggest challenges that make the repair process time last for 3 weeks? What are the necessary means and measures in order to reduce the repair length to 2 weeks? The author adjusted the work to the Swedish repairs, repair issues that arise from sell unit Westermo Data Communications AB with its office in Västerås and performed the status report by mapping the repair process, through using observations, interviews and bibliography research studies. A flow map of four sub-processes (Inbound Delivery, BackOffice, Repair Department, and Logistics) was made and each section was observed, where also the employees were interviewed. Data that has been collected was analysed by the author and the decision to execute a workshop that affects Repair Department and Logistics was made.

Today, pigs are moved on farm, between farms, between countries and to abattoirs. This movement of live pigs requires handling practices that are designed for the purpose. The objective of this study was to research the use of paddle in moving pigs, to investigate if there were different methods of paddle practice, explore the time efficiency of different kinds of paddle use and if there were any time variations in methods that varied in intensity of touch. This study was done on two Swedish abattoirs for a total of five weeks. A total of 22 transporters working at two different abattoirs where studied during unloading of pigs at the abattoirs.

In December 2008 the municipal council in Nybro, decided that the municipality shouldreduce the budget for food service. The budget should be reduced by 2 100 000 SEK.They decided that the children- and education committee, and the care committee would haveto lower their budget with 1 264 000 SEK respectively 636 000 SEK. The change have to bedone under two years, 60 % should be done under 2009 and 40 % under 2010.As a result of the decision, many kitchens have to become kitchens that only serve food, notcook it. This will result in preschool staff and nursing staff take over some of the tasks fromthe kitchen staff. The municipal council also decided that entrepreneurs could take over one(later two) cooking areas.A kitchen that serves food means that there isn?t any cooking involved.

The purpose of this essay is to examine cost-benefit-analysis as a method of evaluation of labour market policy. To illustrate the possibilities and difficulties of the method chapter four contains a partial cost-benefit-analysis of the results of a labour market project in Kävlinge. The questions this essay strives to answer are the following: What possibilities and difficulties do cost-benefit-analyses entail? How would one conduct a cost-benefit-analysis of the project in Kävlinge?The method used in this essay is mainly a literature study of cost-benefit-analysis of labour market programs. The labour market project Brännpunkt is used as an example in a partial cost-benefit-analysis.The applied cost-benefit-analysis of the Brännpunkt project in Kävlinge shows that it is possible to calculate the profit for the society as a whole, given that the necessary information is obtainable.

Now a day?s there is dramatic change from traditional to digital information processing in construction industry. This change can be visualized in the project concept stage where it now has accessibility to join all the data in one place. Location-based planning technique simplifies scheduling by visualizing the schedule efficiently and has many advantages such as might shortened the project period by about 10 - 20 % if the company uses location-based technology, reducing risks in many ways by maintaining production continuity and identify collisions between things etc. Vico Office software has been used for Location based planning technique and in this thesis.The purpose of this thesis work was to demonstrate how location -based planning technology change the scheduling stage in Peab, potentially reducing the project time.

The aim of this study is to establish whether there are any specific trends in master theses concerning knowledge organization. To identify the past and current trends a method of content analysis has been applied to 110 theses over a time period of ten years. The results of this study show that there is an increasing interest in subjects concerning for example the evaluation of retrieval effectiveness in search engines on the Internet. A subject which was popular in the late 1990:s was information technology and its different applications. This subject has since that time decreased in popularity.

Syftet med studien är att få en fördjupad kunskap om innebörden av Time som begrepp samt att ge en bild av hur erfarna lärare hanterar ämnet i sin undervisning. Denna studie har sin teoretiska utgångspunkt i det sociokulturella perspektivet och hur medierande redskap används i undervisningen.Den kvalitativa forskningsintervjun användes som metod för att få svar på mina frågor. De fem informanterna arbetar i antingen Värmlands eller Örebro Län. De är alla verksamma pedagoger på nivåerna från gymnasium upp till musikhögskola och de undervisar i olika musikämnen. Resultatet visar att ämnet handlar om hur man, som musiker, placerar sina toner i förhållande till en given puls samt att alla informanter understryker att Time är viktigt och bör undervisas i.

The study concerns the history and development of hospitallibraries in Sweden in the beginning of the 1900 century.Focus is on the 1930 decade, the time of major expansionof the area. The study is based on study of literature, mainlyfrom articles but also from a few booklets from the time.The purpose of the study is to find out how the librarieswere described in the literature of the time and which goalsand tasks they had. It is also to make it possible to increaseunderstanding of the history of hospital libraries, using it asan inspirational source for development of today´s businessin a time of major change. The result of the study showsthat those goals and ideas are still valid and serve well as aninspirational basis for development of today´s hospitallibraries..

This master thesis studies how much the cycle time, i.e. the time it takes for an industrial robot to perform a given task, can be reduced if an extra degree of freedom (DOF) is added to the robot system. The extra DOF consists of a linear track, which is supposed to be used in an optimal way. The problem has been studied using simulations in the robot simulation tool RobotStudio. To be able to run an optimization in Matlab, with the RobotStudio simulation cycle time as the object function, communication between Matlab and RobotStudio has been set up with an interface written in Visual Basic.