The consumer society exploits the earth’s resources more than the earth itself has capability to produce. This over-consumption causes a mass production of products, which mean that more greenhouse gases are being emitted to the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why the earth’s temperature is rising, where the result of it is worldwide disasters. The paper consumption is part of the causes to climate change, but this is something we can prevent by just changing little things in our everyday lives. Our question is: What does it actually take for us to stop wasting paper as we do? Is it possible at all? We decided to study what the IT-center of Jonkoping county council need to do to reduce their office paper printing. A survey and interviews were made to get to know the employees way to work. Many are very positive towards electronic documents and do not mind a change, as we can see in the results. But many admitted that they have a way to work that is hard to break. With these studies and previous cases, we found a solution for the IT-center. The solutions are reported in an electronic brochure.

<p>The consumer society exploits the earth’s resources more than the earth itself has capability to produce. This over-consumption causes a mass production of products, which mean that more greenhouse gases are being emitted to the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why the earth’s temperature is rising, where the result of it is worldwide disasters. The paper consumption is part of the causes to climate change, but this is something we can prevent by just changing little things in our everyday lives. Our question is: What does it actually take for us to stop wasting paper as we do? Is it possible at all? We decided to study what the IT-center of Jonkoping county council need to do to reduce their office paper printing. A survey and interviews were made to get to know the employees way to work. Many are very positive towards electronic documents and do not mind a change, as we can see in the results. But many admitted that they have a way to work that is hard to break. With these studies and previous cases, we found a solution for the IT-center. The solutions are reported in an electronic brochure.</p>

The paperless office is a concept that has been around for decades. The concept concerns digital technology replacing paper as a medium within the office, but so far a completely paperless office has yet to be achieved. In this study, we have reviewed previous research in order to understand potential reasons for this. We interviewed local offices, to find out how they used paper around the office, and information about what properties a replacement might need. The research questions that guided us through our study were: In what way do local offices store and index data? What themes can we find in their practices that help us further the paperless office? Can we use our findings to create a concept design? Using the information we gathered we designed a conceptual prototype styled after a common binder, to associate the mental models used when working with paper, and imbuing it with digital technology.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / Over the last few years there have been many changes to the container export industry. There are a variety of reasons for these changes including exchange rate fluctuations, fuel and energy price fluctuations and their effects on bulk freight rates. The pressure to enhance and remain competitive has also increased amid these rapid changes. An effective strategy is for companies to focus attentions on costs they can control. In the container freight industry, one of these costs is reducing the “paper” aspects of operations and increasing its “electronic” aspects. This thesis focuses specifically on evaluating FileBound®, document management software, for the purpose of going “paperless” in a Container Freight, Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC) and freight forwarding company. Going paperless has many advantages: increased efficiency, paper and printing cost savings, time savings, storage cost savings, environmental benefits, efficient file retrieval, and enhanced customer service. By adopting the FileBound® technology, the case study company hopes to achieve most of these benefits, allowing it to reduce overall costs, and especially, reduce the number of employees managing physical documents and move people into sales and marketing. The critical assumption of the study was that the electronic processes contributed to time savings and it is from these time savings that most of the other benefits emanated. Therefore, a time study was conducted to determine the time savings resulting from using FileBound® in comparison to the current method in the file completion process. The data collected was analyzed using regression analysis to determine the factors that influenced time savings, if any, and their statistical significance. There are three specific activities involved with the process of completing a transaction in the container freight business: booking, instruction and bill of lading. The analysis was conducted for each of these steps in the process. The results show that the different methods, FileBound® or manual, were not statistically significant on determining the time it took to complete the file. That being said, this thesis recommends that a mixture of both the FileBound® and manual method be used to take advantage of the potential cost savings.

For almost five decades, since the advent of the first computers for commercial use, the dream of the Paperless Office, a.k.a. total Information flow automation, has eluded the industry. Now, with the emergence of Internet- and Web-based technologies, daily we see examples of organizations like eBay and Amazon that perform their business in a fully automated manner without the use of paper or pen. However, bigger and older organizations that have more complex functions, like government organizations, have not been very successful in harnessing the latest technological innovations to completely automate their Information flow. We propose a Structured Information Flow (SIF) framework that provides the conceptual infrastructure to automate small and big, new and old organizations alike. The ease of the transformation is due to three key features of SIF that set it apart from any other Information flow automation scheme. First, SIF utilizes the attributes of the organization, such as the existing reporting structure, to model the automated Information flow. The rules governing the flow of Information are based on the hierarchy already in place, for example: A senior can view any Information owned by any of his/her direct subordinates. Second, SIF characterizes external organization entities as a special case of internal organization entities, allowing for seamless integration of the Information flow to and from them. Third, the SIF framework is independent of platform, method, organization, or technology. This gives it a generic nature that makes it applicable as a platform to implement multiple types of automated e-systems such as e-commerce, e-education, e-training, e-governance, etc. In this body of work, we formally define the SIF framework using state transformation language and a visual representation scheme specifically developed for this purpose. We also define the Information Interfaces, which are the mechanism for implementing rules- and constraint-based Information flow in SIF. / Master of Science

My thesis addresses to matters of rising connectedness of Accounting and Information Technologies. It describes history of forms and techniques used in Accounting and also the possibilities and trends of Applied Informatics used nowadays in this field. The text accents to efforts of making the process of accounting more effective by reducing the cost, improving the quality and by shortening the time it can be done. The part of my thesis also mentions the level of regulation of the techniques used for processing the accounting from the point of view of national norms and also of International standards.