With the globalization, companies in the West chose to shift production to developing countries to cut down costs. This had a major impact when child labor and very poor working conditions in these factories were discovered and led many companies to take responsibility for their suppliers and the employees by adopting voluntary so-called Codes of Conduct.There is a subtle balance to enforce improvement of working conditions for employees at suppliers´ factories and to keep costs down. On the one hand, companies would like to conduct extensive audits at their suppliers to ensure code of conduct compliance and thus protect their legitimacy. On the other hand, audits are expensive so companies would like to minimize audits to keep costs down. Companies thus have to strike a delicate balance in relation to how many and what suppliers they choose to audit.

District heating covers around 80 % of the heating demand in apartment buildings and 10 % in single-family homes in Sweden. In the year 2010 the total input of energy to the Swedish district heating grids was about 70 TWh, which corresponds to 11 % of the total energy input to the whole energy system in the country. Through the combined production of heat and power the CHP-plants often reaches an efficiency of 90 % from energy in the fuel to produced heat and power. In order to keep the efficiency high it is important for the owners of the plant to have good knowledge about the plants performance at different operation points. Strängnäs Energi AB initiated this diploma work together with FVB Sverige ab in order to come up with a program for short term planning of the production of heat and power at the company´s CHP-plant.The work consists of three main parts.

!is began as a product design challenge, which stipulated broadlythat the designer be ?inspired by a subject?, whose ideas would leaddown a path of product idea evolution. From there, the goals forthe end-product would undergo rigorous revisions, re-de#nitionand re#nement. !e end-product itself would be the result of anentire thinking process.!e subject I have chosen is: Time. I want to challenge and evenalter our conventional sense of time, using principles ofdesign.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the use and losses of energy in an existing older building. Another purpose was also to look through various options for heating systems with renewable energy in the building. The aim was to reduce the use and losses of energy. The first step was to study the related electricity bills of the building and also perform measurements and calculations of the building envelope and ventilation. The next step was to find out the possible actions for energy saving by performing measurements and calculations.

The purpose of this study is to examine how pre-school teachers think about the importance of circle time in regard to the child's language and social development from a sociocultural perspective. Furthermore the study will include what role the educators? have during the circle time.To answer our purpose we have chosen the following question:What is the role of the teachers in the circle time?What are the teacher?s thoughts about the circle time?s importance to children's social development?What are the teacher?s thoughts about the circle time?s importance to children's language development?The study is constructed on qualitative methods, where we conducted structured interviews with six preschool teachers and observed their circle time to collect our empirical material. The study is also based on Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective which says that all learning takes place through relations and interaction with other people in the cultural context you are in. The results have shown that pre-school teachers are aware of the circle time?s importance to children?s development, and purposely plan the circle time to give children the opportunity to develop both socially and linguistically skills..

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate whether a combination of product placement and traditional advertising can enhance the company's marketing. We perform this study because we believe that the consumers consider traditional marketing in many cases obsolete.TheoryThe study?s theory consists of topics and terms of product placement, traditional marketing, branding and communications. Theories used in this study were the basis to answer the study's research question using empirical data gathered during the study.MethodThe study has a deductive approach with a qualitative focus, therefore, the study is based on existing research, which was later to use for the data extracted from the interviews. The approach is going to show differences and similarities between how it looks in reality versus theory.ConclusionThe results of this study show that product placement can increase the efficiency of traditional marketing.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse studies that evaluate Web search engines. This is done in four categories; the researchers? purpose, the evaluation measurements, the relevance, and the time aspect. Our method is based on a text analysis in which we use the direction of analysis of the content of sixteen evaluation experiments. Our results indicate fundamental differences in the way the researchers are tackling the problem of evaluation of Web search engines.

Music production software has a strong tradition of two-dimensional graphical user interface (GUI), in which the time line is represented as a flat composition either horizontally (from left to right) or vertically (from top to bottom). In my degree work titled Sequi, I approach music composition from a different angle. Instead of a two-dimensional time line with only two possibly ways of progression (forward or backward) I constructed a three-dimensional GUI with the maximum of four different ways of progression from any given point in a composition. The height axis is used to describe time-intervals (the time between downbeats) and the wide and depth axes are used to describe progression from one sound to another..

In 2014, the Swedish leisure-time centres after school became widely criticized on several occasions by school authorities. The cause for its criticism was a reflection of leisure time-centres with lots of untrained staff and a lack of pedagogical aspirations. The conclusion of the criticism was that these leisure-time centres do not fulfil their potential. However, these assessments has only to a limited extent become a part of the public educational discourse in Sweden. This discourse has mainly focused on the decreasing results in the Swedish school, which has caught the attention in the media and ended up on the political agenda.

With a larger awareness of the climate changes and increasing electricity prices, energy efficiency measures in the industry have become more common. By rationalize the activity and by the same time decrease the emission of greenhouse gases the company can both save money and reduce negative environmental impact. For the Swedish industries the electricity price have traditional been relative low, which has resulted in a considerable larger usage than other European countries. By a deregulation of the European electricity market the electricity price will level off between the countries, which will cause a higher electricity price in Sweden than we are use to. To prevent that the Swedish industry don?t lose competitiveness against the other European countries, it will require energy efficiency activities in all different forms.ABB Sweden has decided to decrease their total energy usage with five percent in two years.

AbstractThis degree project is about having meetings in The Swedish Social Insurance Agency, which is awide organisation. This work will concentrate on one of the projects going on within theorganisation which is travel-free meetings, where they are building a video meeting system thatallows the employees in the organisation to be able to meet with each other through the use ofvideoconferencing instead of physical meetings.In this work we will show how Kaikaku (radical system changes) along with Kaizen (continuouschange) can support an organisation to become more efficient and reduce wastage. We have donethis work in an organisation that is present in over one hundred locations in Sweden.The Social Insurance Agency has over 13 000 employees at over one hundred locations inSweden.The organisation has to be close to their customers and provide the best service aspossible. To be able to work in a uniform way, the employees get together and have meetings.Some meetings are just progress meetings and takes perhaps no more than two hours to complete.However, if seven employees from seven different locations need to have meetings, in the worstcase, they all have to meet in a common place.This is expensive for the organisation in travel costs, time and absence from work, but thetravelling also contributes to environmental pollution if the employees are travelling by a fuelpoweredvehicle.A whole day could go lost for having a meeting in about two hours if all sevenemployees went from their own cities to e.g. Stockholm for the meeting.Muda (wastage) of travel created several different types of Muda, namely:? Wastage with anticipation when the employees had to wait for e.g.

AbstractBuilding Information Model/Modeling/Management (BIM) is a tool that allows for efficient working methods. BIM saves time and money while providing the potential for visualization. This method of working is based on a 3D-model, and then a fourth and fifth dimension are connected. 5D modeling means that a spreadsheet creates cost estimates based on the 3D model. This provides opportunities to carry out calculations in the early stages of the projects. Calculations are currently performed manually and do not contribute to the development that the construction industry requires.

Lyckeby Starch AB is a farmer-owned company that produces products based on potato starch. In order to increase their production efficiency and their international competitiveness the company is investigating the possibilities of keeping their factories open longer. To achieve this, potato has to be stored for a longer period of time than what is practiced today. Starch potato is usually stored in large piles covered by straw and plastic, either in the field or on the farmyard. The objective was to examine in what way starch yield (starch content*tuber weight) in three different potato varieties was affected by storage in two different types of storage piles. The potato was stored for three months in total and starch content and tuber weight were controlled throughout the period. Stored tubers were also visually examined and prescense of mechanical damage as well as wet rots and dry rots was recorded. Bacteria and fungi were isolated and identified. In general, varietal differences were greater than differences between the storage piles.

This report is the documentation of a project in the education Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering. The project was carried out at Alfakonsult AB. The purpose of the project was to map out the transference of information between the different operators in the supply chain of medicine in Sweden and to analyse this in order to reduce lead-time and the total throughputtime. The supply chain of medicine in Sweden consists of producers, distributors, one wholesaler, prescribers and patients. The mapping of the transference of information showed that most operators in the supply chain have done well introducing technical aids to facilitate the transference of information.

The care for the elderly in the municipalities has recently seen the need for a formalized system for quality assurance. Under increasing demands for monetary efficiency while bound by law to retain acceptable standards in health care, there is need for efficient and at the same time quality-assured management. The municipalities often solve this puzzle by introducing systems and standards influenced by theory-clusters such as NPM (New Public Management), TQM (Total Quality Management) or other quality management theories.This essay focuses on how the public administration in the municipalities defines quality and designs and implements system for formalized quality assurance. Our basic view of organizations is institutionalist and our theoretical framework includes theories about quality, NPM and TQM..