This thesis describes the process of development of mobile application on the Microsoft Windows platform. The described process covers all stages from the analysis of the target market through design and development of the application to the plan of publishing the app in the Windows Store. Development of the mobile part of Windows 8.1 Universal App using the C# programming language and XAML markup language is integral part of this thesis.

This diploma thesis focuse on drafting management strategy in multinational company. This proposal is based on an online store that as a future source for the company ABC business development. This thesis deals with the theoretical description of the logistics approach and its contents, further more it is continues with evaluating the actual state of the company. In conclusion the thesis contains a specific design of e-shop to company should improve its market position.

This thesis is a qualitative research that provides an understanding of store managers perception of internal marketing on the Swedish retail market. It also describes how the store managers use internal marketing to guide their frontline employees to deliver high quality service. This research aims to highlight the importance of service deliverance in the retail sector. Due to the changes that are taking place within retail where globalization, digitalisation and automation are changing customers' views on trade, it is becoming increasingly important to differentiate themselves. More and more physical stores are finding it difficult to survive and many are forced to shut down.  This study therefore wants to highlight the use of internal marketing to be able to deliver high quality service at the encounter between the frontline employees and the customer in physical stores. Therefore, the study will give answers to the following questions: (1) How do store managers on the Swedish retail market perceive internal marketing? (2) How are internal marketing used in physical stores to work with service quality deliverance? To answer these two questions a meticulous examination of previous studies on the concepts internal marketing, employee satisfaction and service quality was made. A conceptual framework for the study was set to classify and analyse the findings of the study. The empirical findings consis data collected through semi-structured interviews with six store managers of three different retail stores on the Swedish market.   It was concluded that the store managers perception of internal marketing is unclear but that they all believe it is important. Nevertheless, it can be seen that internal marketing is important and that the store managers work daily with activities to guide the frontline employees to deliver high quality service. However, these activities are not expressed as internal marketing among the companies and store managers. It was also concluded that the service quality delivered by the frontline employees was significant to the success of the stores in the store manager's point of view.

Depuis quelques années, les groupes de distribution alimentaires français ont développé de nouveaux concepts de magasins de proximité et on note une augmentation régulière de leurs parts de marché. Les raisons du succès de ces magasins peuvent s’expliquer par certains facteurs sociodémographiques (vieillissement, taille réduite des ménages) mais aussi par une modification des attentes temporelles des consommateurs. A travers cette recherche, nous nous interrogeons sur les notions de proximité et de temporalité dans la distribution et tentons de prédire l’intention des consommateurs de fréquenter ces nouveaux concepts de magasins de proximité. L’analyse de 22 entretiens qualitatifs auprès de distributeurs et de consommateurs nous a permis de proposer un modèle conceptuel qui a ensuite été testé de manière empirique auprès de deux échantillons de 250 consommateurs chacun, en se basant sur une analyse par équations structurelles de type PLS. Les résultats montrent que les libres-services alimentaires de proximité fidélisent leur clientèle essentiellement par la proximité relationnelle et fonctionnelle qu’ils apportent, ainsi que par la possibilité qu’ils offrent aux consommateurs, de mieux gérer leur temps. En effet, certaines de leurs caractéristiques (amplitude d’ouverture, faible taille du magasin et des assortiments, temps limité d’attente aux caisses) permettent, aux consommateurs, non seulement de gagner du temps (chronos), mais surtout de fréquenter ces magasins au moment voulu, et de manière immédiate (kaïros). Ces concepts de magasins semblent donc entrer en résonnance avec les attentes du consommateur post-moderne en quête de lien social et vivant de plus en plus dans le présentisme et l’immédiateté. / Since few years, French food retailers have developed new concepts of convenience stores and their market share increase regularly. The reasons for their success can be explained by socio-demographic factors (aging, smaller households) but also by a change in temporal consumer expectations. Through this research, we question the notions of proximity and temporality in retailing and try to predict the intention to patronize these new concepts of convenience stores by consumers. The analysis of 22 qualitative interviews with retailers and consumers has enabled us to propose a conceptual model which was then tested empirically with two samples of 250 consumers each, based on a PLS structural equation modeling. Results show that customers patronize convenience stores primarily through the relational and functional proximity they bring, as well as the opportunity they offer to consumers to better manage their time. Indeed, some of their characteristics (opening hours, small store size and assortment, limited waiting time at checkout) allow consumers not only to save time (chronos), but mainly frequent these stores at the right time and immediately (kaïros). This store concepts seem then to meet post-modern consumer’s expectations seeking for social links and living increasingly in presentism and immediacy.

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As private labels have developed and increased in recent years, customers’ options have grown. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore how customers reason when they choose a brand in a Swedish sportswear store, which offers both private labels and national brands. More specifically, the following attributes, private labels versus national brands, customer behavior, and store layout are considered in order to address a possible complexity in the brand choice. The empirical material was collected through twelve exit interviews outside Stadium stores in four cities, combined with four observations in four Stadium stores. The findings revealed that private labels and national brands seem to have similar product characteristics, which may cause complexity in customers’ brand choices. This thesis contributes with an insight into a new dynamic within the walls of a sportswear store and discusses what aspects influence customers’ brand choice.

For an IT company that provides a service over the Internet like Facebook or Spotify, it is very important to provide a high quality of service; however, predicting the quality of service is generally a hard task. The goal of this thesis is to investigate whether an approach that makes use of statistical learning to predict the quality of service can obtain accurate predictions for a Voldemort key-value store [1] in presence of dynamic load patterns and network statistics. The approach follows the idea that the service-level metrics associated with the quality of service can be estimated from serverside statistical observations, like device and network statistics. The advantage of the approach analysed in this thesis is that it can virtually work with any kind of service, since it is based only on device and network statistics, which are unaware of the type of service provided. The approach is structured as follows. During the service operations, a large amount of device statistics from the Linux kernel of the operating system (e.g. cpu usage level, disk activity, interrupts rate) and some basic end-to-end network statistics (e.g. average round-trip-time, packet loss rate) are periodically collected on the service platform. At the same time, some service-level metrics (e.g. average reading time, average writing time, etc.) are collected on the client machine as indicators of the store’s quality of service. To emulate network statistics, such as dynamic delay and packet loss, all the traffic is redirected to flow through a network emulator. Then, different types of statistical learning methods, based on linear and tree-based regression algorithms, are applied to the data collections to obtain a learning model able to accurately predict the service-level metrics from the device and network statistics. The results, obtained for different traffic scenarios and configurations, show that the thesis’ approach can find learning models that can accurately predict the service-level metrics for a single-node store with error rates lower than 20% (NMAE), even in presence of network impairments.

“Pay-as-you-go” is one of the basic properties of Cloud computing. It means that people pay for the resources or services that they use. Moreover, the concept of load balancing has been a controversial issue in recent years. It is a method that is used to split a task to some smaller tasks and allocate them fairly to different resources resulting in a better performance. Considering these two concepts, the idea of “Elasticity” comes to attention. An Elastic system is one which adds or releases the resources based on the changes of the system variables. In this thesis, we extended a distributed storage called Voldemort by adding a controller to provide elasticity. Control theory was used to design this controller. In addition, we used Yahoo! Cloud Service Benchmark (YCSB) which is an open source framework that can be used to provide several load scenarios, as well as evaluating the controller. Automatic control is accomplished by adding or removing nodes in Voldemort by considering changes in the system such as the average service time in our case. We will show that when the service time increases due to increasing the load, as generated by YCSB tool, the controller senses this change and adds appropriate number of nodes to the storage. The number of nodes added is based on the controller parameters to decrease the service time and meet Service Level Objectives (SLO). Similarly, when the average service time decreases, the controller removes some nodes to reduce the cost of using the resources and meet “pay-as-you-go” property.

The covid-19 pandemic can endanger the physical and mental health of people in general, but a particularly vulnerable group are people who work in stores. The purpose of the study was to examine how the health of store employees had been affected by the covid-19 pandemic and to identify if age, gender, form of employment, line of business and type of store, are important contributing factors. To answer the purpose a web-based survey was performed where 783 store employees participated. The results showed that store employees had relatively high anxiety levels concerning covid-19 infection and relatively high stress levels concerning increased workload because of covid-19. A large proportion of the store employees who had less social interactions due to their job had experienced sadness. The results also showed that there were several factors that affected the health of store employees. The factors who clearly influenced the anxiety and stress levels were if the store employees had shown symptoms, has had covid-19 or were in risk group. Gender, line of business and what type of store they worked in also had some impact on anxiety or stress levels. Age and form of employment were however factors who influenced the health very little according to this study, but to draw this conclusion with certainty further studies are needed. The conclusion is that the health of store employees has been negatively affected by the covid-19 pandemic regarding increased anxiety, stress and sadness, and also that risk group is the foremost contributing factor.

Livsmedel står för en stor del av vår klimatpåverkan och således har livsmedelsbutiker en betydande roll att spela i livsmedelskedjan. Hållbarhet och miljömässiga utmaningar diskuteras mer än någonsin och berör alla aspekter i företagandet – inte minst marknadsföringen. Syftet med studien är att visa på hur samspelet mellan marknadsföringsbeslut i marknadsmixen och hållbarhet ser ut, där reduktion av matsvinn är den kontext av hållbar marknadsföring som studien adresserar. För att undersöka detta samspel används marknadsmixen sexhörningen vilken jämförs med CSR-strategin shared value. Studien är kvalitativ där empiriinsamlingen skett via semistrukturerade intervjuer och observationer. Åtta butikers handlare eller butikschefer har deltagit för att kunna ge insyn från de som arbetar mest med både marknadsföring och strategier i företagen.Resultaten visar på att samtliga butiker arbetar med hållbara marknadsföringsbeslut vad gäller reduceringen av matsvinn, där olika utmaningar för större och mindre butiker uppdagas. Butikerna i studien arbetar på ett liknande arbetssätt i den dagliga driften, där omfattningen av volymer är den största skillnaden. Samtliga butiker skapar värde för företagen och samhället med deras marknadsföringsbeslut, även om det finns en avsaknad av uttalad hållbarhetsstrategi hos alla. / Food accounts for a large portion of our climate impact and therefore food stores have a significant role to play in the supply chain of food. Sustainability and environmental challenges are more relevant than ever before, and affects all activities in business – especially marketing. The purpose of the study is to present the interplay between decisions in the marketing mix and sustainability, where food waste is the context of sustainable marketing which the study addresses. The marketing mix ‘The hexagon’ is compared with the CSR strategy ‘Shared Value’to examine this interplay. The study is qualitative where interviews and observations was used for the empirical collection. Eight stores owners or managers has participated in interviews to be able to get insight from the people working closest to marketing and strategy decisions in the companies. The results shows that all of the stores works with sustainable marketing decisions in terms of reduction of food waste, where different challenges for bigger and smaller stores appears. All of the stores in this study works similar in the daily operations, where the volumes are the greatest difference. All of the stores creates value for themselves and the communities with their marketing decisions, although there is a lack of spoken sustainability strategy at all stores.