<p>Abstract</p><p>Title: Relevant factors that affect three small and midsize enterprises during an ERP-system implementation</p><p>Authors: Fredrik Dreimanis and Thomas Jylhä</p><p>Tutor: Peter Ekman</p><p>Keywords: ERP, implementation, SME</p><p>Problem: Which factors has relevance for small and midsize enterprises during an ERP-system implementation?</p><p>Purpose: The purpose with this essay is to describe and analyze what distinguishes an implementation for small and midsize enterprises.</p><p>Methodology:The authors have answered the problem with help of theories and articles within the subject of IT and economics and five interviews with companies in different areas of business.</p><p>Theoretical framework:The most difficult part with adapting a new ERP- system is the implementation phase. (Muscatello et al. 2003) The reason is that the standardization and changing of business processes is a common occurrence during an implementation. (Gattiker and Goodhue. 2002)</p><p>Analyze:The study shows that there are a lot of equal factors between the theoretical framework and the empirical study.</p><p>Conclusion: According to this study the reason for a small or midsize enterprise to adopt a new ERP-system is to get better control over their business. Improved control leads to increased revenues.</p>

<p>Good business relations can contribute to the success of IT-outsourcing, and create new business opportunities. Despite a sharply increasing trend to outsource IT-operations there is a high degree of failures related. The cause may be that some important factors have not been taken into account. The purpose is to investigate elationships within IT-outsourcing and test if specific factors identified by previous research are being concerned in IT-outsourcing relationships and also to investigate the view IT-outsourcing customers and suppliers have on business.<p> </p></p><p>Research shows that business relationships are widespread throughout companies. It demonstrated that a small number of business relationships can have a major impact on a company's financial performance and may create stability. Business relationships can be divided into an arm's length relationships and strategic alliances depending on the degree of involvement. IT is now the most common activity companies choose to outsource and the objectives are mainly related to costs but IT-outsourcing projects can also create strategic opportunities. IToutsourcing consists mainly of three components, supplier, customer and project. For an IT-outsourcing relationship to be successful there is some factors that should be carefully treated. These may include communication, commitment, choice of supplier and cultural similarities.</p><p><p>Implementation of the study consists of previous research which is compared with a total of five interviewed companies. All the respondents have been informed about the study's purpose and which role their organization will have. Earlier theoretical sources have been carefully considered and critically examined by contemporary standards, tend criticism, depending criticism and authenticity.</p></p><p>The study shows that the perception that respondents have been of business relationships is that they think it has a major role in IT-outsourcing projects. They also have a good knowledge of the factors that previous research claims has a strong influence on IT-outsourcing projects. These factors are: equal cultures / values, the choice of supplier, trust, commitment, contract / SLA management, communication, reciprocity / joint targets and responsible individual’s role. An additional factor was identified: proactivity, innovation and development.</p>

<p>The internet advertising market is growing much faster than any other advertising vertical. The technology for serving advertising online goes more and more towards automated processes that analyze the page content and the user’s preferences and then matches the ads with these parameters.</p><p>The task at hand was to research and find methods that could be suitable for matching web documents to ads automatically, build a prototype system, make an evaluation and suggest areas for further development. The goals of the system was high throughput, accurate ad matching and fast response times. A requirement on the system was that human input could only be done when adding ads into the system for the system to be scalable.</p><p>The prototype system is based on the vector space model and a td-idf weighting scheme. The cosines coefficient was used in the system to quantify the similarity between a web document and an ad.</p><p>A technique called stemming was also implemented in the system together with a clustering solution that aided the ad matching in cases where few matches could be done on the keywords attached to the ads. The system was built with a threaded structure to improve throughput and scalability.</p><p>The tests results show that you accurately can match ads to a website’s content using the vector space model and the cosines-coefficient. The tests also show that the stemming has a positive effect on the ad matching accuracy.</p>

<p>This thesis is about improving the image quality of image sequences scanned by the film scanner GoldenEye. Film grain is often seen as an artistic effect in film sequences but scanned images can be more grainy or noisy than the intention. To remove the grain and noise as well as sharpen the images a few known image enhancement methods have been implemented, tested and evaluated. An own idea of a thresholding method using the dyadic wavelet transform has also been tested. As benchmark has MATLAB been used but one method has also been implemented in C/C++. Some of the methods works satisfactory when it comes to the image result but none of the methods works satisfactory when it comes to time consumption. To solve that a few speed up ideas are suggested in the end of the thesis. A method to correct the color of the sequences has also been suggested.</p>

<p>The thesis presents the basics of Quantum Key Distribution, a survey of the present techniques, a look at the possible future, and finally a comparison to the alternative technique of using public key or manual distribution of keys.</p><p>Techniques to integrate QKD with the existing telecom fiber infrastructure have been studied, and so has the EU-funded project SECOQC.</p><p>Last the security and efficiency of QKD have been examined, with focus on what level of security that is required, existing security solutions have been used as a comparison.</p>

<p>Measuring information security is the key to unlocking the knowledge of how secure information systems really are. In order to perform these measurements, security metrics can be used. Since all systems and organizations are different, there is no single set of metrics that is generally applicable. In order to help organizations create metrics, this thesis will present a metrics creation framework providing a structured way of creating the necessary metrics for any information system. The framework takes a high level information security goal as input, and transforms it to metrics using decomposition of goals that are then inserted into a template. The thesis also presents a set of metrics based on a minimum level of information security produced by the Swedish emergency management agency. This set of metrics can be used to show compliance with the minimum level or as a base when a more extensive metrics program is created.</p>

<p>With the increasing use of extensive IT systems for sensitive or safety-critical applications, the matter of IT security is becoming more important. In order to be able to make sensible decisions about security there is a need for measures and metrics for computer security. There currently exist no established methods to assess the security of information systems.</p><p>This thesis presents a method for assessing the security of computer systems. The basis of the method is that security relevant characteristics of components are modelled by a set of security features and connections between components are modelled by special functions that capture the relations between the security features of the components. These modelled components and relations are used to assess the security of each component in the context of the system and the resulting system dependent security values are used to assess the overall security of the system as a whole.</p><p>A software tool that implements the method has been developed and used to demonstrate the method. The examples studied show that the method delivers reasonable results, but the exact interpretation of the results is not clear, due to the lack of security metrics.</p>

<p>Företaget Ritkonsult är ett företag på Västkusten som utför diverse konsulttjänster, främst rituppdrag inom brandskydd. De har den senaste tiden sett ett uppsving för främst prisjämförelser på Internet. Detta arbete har därför gått ut på att utveckla en prisjämförelsetjänst för lokala företag på Internet. Tanken är att företag själva ska kunna lägga till uppgifter och administrera dessa. Informationen ska kunna gå att söka efter och jämföras med annan liknande information. För att användare med olika Internetvana ska kunna använda tjänsten har webbsidan gjorts så användbar som möjligt med Usability Engineering metoden. Ett antal tester har utförts med riktiga företag för att upptäcka användbarhetsproblem och rätta till dem till den slutgiltiga webbsidan. </p><p>Resultatet har blivit en dynamisk webbsida med fokus på användbarhet och flexibilitet; den kan användas av olika företag och av olika personer som vill söka efter information. En hel del hade kunnat göras annorlunda under arbetets gång, till exempel hade flera metoder för att skapa användbarhet kunnat studeras. Trots de brister som finns är beställarna och jag nöjda med resultatet.</p>

<p>Communication over today’s IP-based networks are to some extent subject to packet loss. Most real-time applications, such as video streaming, need methods to hide this effect, since resending lost packets may introduce unacceptable delays. For IP-based video streaming applications such a method is referred to as a <em>packet loss concealment </em>scheme.</p><p>In this thesis a recently proposed mixture model and least squares-based packet loss concealment scheme is implemented and evaluated together with three more well known concealment methods. The JM reference software is used as basis for the implementation, which is a public available software codec for the H.264 video coding standard. The evaluation is carried out by comparing the schemes in terms of objective measurements, subjective observations and a study with human observers.</p><p>The recently proposed packet loss concealment scheme shows good performance with respect to the objective measures, and careful observations indicate better concealment of scenes with fast motion and rapidly changing video content. The study with human observers verifies the results for the case when a more sophisticated packetization technique is used.</p><p>A new packet loss concealment scheme, based on joint modeling of motion vectors and pixels, is also investigated in the last chapter as an additional contribution of the thesis.</p>

<p>Information and communication technology already has a long history of influence in basically all areas of an enterprise. In recent years though, a major discussion emerged whether information and communication technologies (ICT) offer an additional strategic value for a business.</p><p>The different positions maintain reasonable arguments on both sides. One position is that ICT basically has become a commodity, obtainable by everyone. There would be no strategical nor competitive gain, so extra efforts in ICT would be in vain. Another position is that, although, nowadays ICT is easy to acquire, the organisational skills necessary to manage the change and to profit from a good system are a scarce resource and difficult to reproduce.</p><p>As much as this discussion has been the subject of many academic articles, as little has the research on the views of practitioners emerged. What is their opinion on the strategic relevance of information and communication technology? Do they consider it as merely a necessary commodity, only used to stay competitive, or do they think that there is a competitive advantage to gain in a sophisticated and possibly leading-edge system? Also, a third view is conceivable, in which practitioners regard ICT as just a tool, which serves best by reconsidering the intensity of its use in every new venture.</p><p>In order to get answers to these questions, semi-structured telephone interviews with leading ICT officers were conducted. The outcome gives a broad overview on what practitioners consider as strategically important in ICT systems and what the current view of the academic guild on this question looks like. An analysis on where, how and why the academic- and the business-views overlap or differ from each other, together with an interpretation of the interview results, concludes the work.</p>