Companies spend huge amounts on communicating their brand through marketing. Many of these contact areas where the consumer comes in contact with the brand is con-trolled by the company. The brand image is also affected from outside the company. It can be from users, media, blogs etc.Burberry is an example of a company that got in trouble with their brand image after hooligans where associated with their products. If a company with a brand with a strong image is associated whith consumers that are not compatible with the target group the company wants, there is a risk of a negative affect on the brand image.Our purpose is to investigate and describe the phenomenom when a company brandimage is affected by being associated whith consumers not compatable whith, by the company, intended target group.We have chosen a qualitative research where we use a multiple case study.

AbstractNowadays, companies and organizations manage large amounts of data to be used as support in decision making. A good solution for data management is in the form of data warehouses. A data warehouse is used to gather information from multiple sources within a company and arrange the information in a way that makes it easy to retrieve and analyze. Designing a data warehouse is not a simple task. The study herein will focus on what a data warehouse is and how the ETL process is used for data storage in the data warehouse. ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load and is the process that retrieves data, transforms it and finally loads it into the data warehouse.

Shareholder, who decides to continue with the company, can cause that they become per-sonally liable for its upcoming obligations. Creditors must lodge an appeal against the shareholder to get compensation for the harm they have suffered. The damage rules in Swedish company law are designed to utilize the company?s interest, that is, shareholders and other corporate members shall promote the interests of the company and not cause damage.The rules about compensation that shareholder obligates itself to are difficult to apply and are adapt to the specific cases. For a shareholder to be personally responsible in a real situation a company has to establish a subsidiary company, which is being driven undercapitalized, intended to benefit the shareholder.

Companies will increasingly begin to link their applications, and the technology that makesthis possible is called integration. The more applications that are connected, the more of the company's data flows through these integrations. It is also clear that data analyses to create business value and to get competitive advantages against its competitors are important. In this paper, we examine how companies create business value and competitive advantages throughthe integration platforms and metadata from the integrations. We have interviewedpeople from three companies in the industrial sector, each with an integration platform.We have also interviewed Enfo Zystems, a company that provides development andmanagement of integration platforms to these customers.

Title: Globalization ? Meeting a new market Author: Anna Nubäck Supervisor: Anders Nilsson Institution: School of Management, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola Course: Master in business administration, 15 credits (FED006) Purpose: The purpose of this essay is partly to create an understanding of the decision to establish a branch in Japan and especially to look at if and how the Swedish company in this study has adjusted its corporate culture to suit the Japanese market. Method: Data is collected thru a number of semi constructed interviews. A first telephone interview was followed by an interview made face to face that was also followed up by interviews performed over telephone. E-mails have been used to clear and correct collected data.

The goal for this thesis work was to develop Business Intelligence (BI) for an IT consultant company.LexiConsult is an IT consultant company in the Lexicon-group which offers expertise within Office (templates, database, spreadsheets, Outlook etc.) but also SharePoint development and services like support, documentation etcetera.We have investigated the functionality in SharePoint and MS SQL Server and have also evaluated which possibilities these platforms offer in terms of creating a BI-solution for LexiConsults needs. SharePoint offers a variety of different tools and services for BI but none of these where available in the Office365-version which LexiConsult uses. Another solution was therefore suggested where the reports should be published on a web hosting company.We have also studied critical success factors when implementing BI in an IT consulting company.The result is a set of BI-reports developed for SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which the staff of LexiConsult can access via their SharePoint site.The reports are designed for monitoring and analysis of the economy with e.g. key performance indicators, drill-down of the revenue in different aspects such as by time period, per employee, per customer etcetera. The reports provides vital knowledge that can be used for decision support, e.g.

In today?s competitive market, design is an important element for the companies. They must succeed with delivering an increased value and an experience for the consumer to be able to survive. The Swedish company?s have become better in the design area, the higher standards the consumer?s demands forces the company to invest more in design.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare if a charter company's attitude and vision of service can be reconciled with the attitudes and visions that the customers have in the same area. In order to carry out the study a qualitative approach is used. The data has been collected by interviews, focus groups and observations. The framework is theories on the subject of customer satisfaction, quality of service at customer meetings, Self-Service technologies, quality assurance and gap in service.The study has concluded that the approach to service is relatively equal between the company and customers, but the future visions differ. Focus group participants have been thinking bigger and further into the future, while the company focuses more on specific functions.

Title: Globalization ? Meeting a new market Author: Anna Nubäck Supervisor: Anders Nilsson Institution: School of Management, Blekinge Tekniska Högskola Course: Master in business administration, 15 credits (FED006) Purpose: The purpose of this essay is partly to create an understanding of the decision to establish a branch in Japan and especially to look at if and how the Swedish company in this study has adjusted its corporate culture to suit the Japanese market. Method: Data is collected thru a number of semi constructed interviews. A first telephone interview was followed by an interview made face to face that was also followed up by interviews performed over telephone. E-mails have been used to clear and correct collected data. I have also studied company reports, closely related literature, articles and papers on the Internet. Conclusion: My conclusion is that the company in this study based the decision to open a branch in Japan on the demand from one big customer and the potential to grow globally.

Purpose: The purpose of the essay is; to explain and clarify how the company is acting to lead members in social media to achieve valuable external communication. The authors believe that it is important to act with credibility and quality in social media, to accomplish long lasting relationships. When employees communicate with consumers their conduct is relevant to the company's credibility.Methodology: An inductive approach has been used for the empirical data collection since the authors have been studying the reality without existing theories. A qualitative research method has been used for collecting the empirical material. Primary data was collected from telephone interviews with seven companies, active in social media.Conclusions: The study shows that the power of employees? can be used when designing strategies for social media.

Purpose: The purpose of the essay is; to explain and clarify how the company is acting to lead members in social media to achieve valuable external communication. The authors believe that it is important to act with credibility and quality in social media, to accomplish long lasting relationships. When employees communicate with consumers their conduct is relevant to the company's credibility.Methodology: An inductive approach has been used for the empirical data collection since the authors have been studying the reality without existing theories. A qualitative research method has been used for collecting the empirical material. Primary data was collected from telephone interviews with seven companies, active in social media.Conclusions: The study shows that the power of employees? can be used when designing strategies for social media.

This thesis considers the problems associated with searches in insufficiently geographically tagged data. The thesis was carried out at Booli Search Technologies AB, a company developing a search engine for the Swedish real estate market.The aim of the thesis is to identify some areas of possible improvements of the company?s existing technical platform, perform a benchmarking among similar services, suggest possible solutions and lastly, build a prototype from one of the suggested solutions.The thesis starts out with defining the problems that the search engine faces: some areas are not possible to perform searches on, the users are not presented with the full search result that they expect, some results are placed incorrectly on the map associated with the search results and results are also not described with enough geographical information. These problems are due to the fact that the data retrieved at the indexing stage in the company?s information retrieval process are insufficient and incomplete.As a result of a benchmarking process and after discussing the results, severalinteresting solutions were identified.

The textile business is one of the oldest industries of our time, and it employs nearly 1.4 million workers within the European Union alone. It is not unusual that this is the foundation of a country?s industrialisation. Even though the industry brings many positive factors, there are also negative factors that will influence the industry?s growth in the future.

Purpose: The purpose of the essay is; to explain and clarify how the company is acting to lead members in social media to achieve valuable external communication. The authors believe that it is important to act with credibility and quality in social media, to accomplish long lasting relationships. When employees communicate with consumers their conduct is relevant to the company's credibility.Methodology: An inductive approach has been used for the empirical data collection since the authors have been studying the reality without existing theories. A qualitative research method has been used for collecting the empirical material. Primary data was collected from telephone interviews with seven companies, active in social media.Conclusions: The study shows that the power of employees? can be used when designing strategies for social media.

The purpose of this study is to analyse how a distribution and sale-network for quality softwood lumber should be designed to fit sawmilling companies? business concepts, and at the same time satisfy customer needs regarding delivery time and quality aspects. This thesis work is a case study based on a sawmilling and retail company in Sweden. AB Karl Hedin is a private owned sawmilling company with 500 employees. The company?s turnover is 1500 million SEK, it includes 4 sawmills, 16 builders merchants stores and a packaging company.