Background: In recent times, the maritime shipping industry has been facing several challenges due to higher shipping costs caused by delayed deliveries and underperformance damaging the relationship between operating companies and end-customers. Researchers have shown the potential usefulness of an integrated supply chain system as it helps improve business results and end-customer relationships. It has also been shown to have a tremendous impact on operational and financial performance. Purpose: This thesis aims to analyze supply chain integration in the maritime transport sector to improve end-customer relationships and performance. Particularly, the logistics and distribution in terms of preventing delays and increased prices. Method: This thesis is conducted as a case study at a Scandinavian international service provider company. Empirical data is collected through semi-structured interviews with employees within the company and their end-customers. Content analysis is used to create themes that clearly relate to research. Conclusion: The study shows that inefficiencies in the shipping service supply chain are due to lack of integration within logistics and distribution processes. Improvements of the operations to improve the lead time and the pricing in the supply chain are needed to reduce such gaps. As data have been collected from a single company and its end-customers, the analysis shows that all actors in the supply chain must act as a single entity and work for a unified goal, and more studies are needed to confirm the applicability of these results to other cases with similar conditions.

Product Development Processes have achieved a state of some maturity in recent years, but have focused primarily on structuring technical activities from the initiation of development to launch. We advocate major advances on three fronts; first, implementing an end-to-end process from the front end through field operations, second, integrating business considerations much better into the end-to-end process, and third, incorporating a performance improvement closed loop into the process. We call the resulting process a Product Development Business Process. Three initial applications are summarized. / Improving product development processes along three key vectors leads to greatly improved business performance. / Center for Innovation in Product Development

This master thesis approaches the energy markets from the point of view of an electricity trader acting on the retail markets, in particular an electricity supplier to the end customers. The first part introduces the reader into the basic practices applied in the management process of the portfolio of end customers, which includes metering and evaluation of the real take-off, planning and prediction and, of course, final evaluation of the imbalances. Second part explains the principles of balance management in case of the entire ČEPS electrical grid, mechanics of the imbalances settlement and describes its actual setting with focus on the way it motivates the market participants for minimization of their own imbalances and therefore improvement of the overall electrical grid balance. The final part describes the basic construction of the risk surcharges, which the supplier adds to the commodity price to cover the costs caused by the existence of his end customers' imbalances. Furthermore, it is shown how the dependence on the system imbalance influences the size of the risk surcharge and the basic model is extended to include even this factor. Because the supplier does not set the surcharge at the level of individual end customer but for the entire portfolio, the functioning and power of the portfolio effect, which brings an extra savings in the imbalances settlement costs, is also explored in the final part. The possibility of dependence presence in the imbalances of individual end customers is also accounted for. For the first time in the Czech academic literature the economic problems that are faced by the electricity supplier to the end customers are examined and the analysis and solution of one important problem is provided in the full picture. However, the most important contribution of this master thesis lays in the opening of this topic to further examination on the academic ground.

This thesis focuses on the comprehensive evaluation of the investment project for housing construction in Brno. In the paper I will first focus on the economic evaluation of the project and will define the conditions of the project for its acceptability and feasibility. Next, I will focus on the possibilities of the project sale and the associated risk analysis. The last section focuses on a separate proposal of promotional ways and a way of financing for the end customer.