Yes / This paper aims to focus on systematically analysing and synthesising the extant research published on supply chain integration (SCI) area, given the significance of SCI research area. More specifically, the authors aim to answer three questions: “Q1 – What are the factors (e.g. both driving and inhibiting) that influence SCI?”, “Q2 – What are the key developments (e.g. both in research and industry) in SCI area?” and “Q3 – What are the approaches employed/discussed to integrate supply chains?”. Over the past decade, SCI has gained increasing attention in the supply chain management (SCM) context, both from the practitioners’ perspective and as a research area. In realising the global transformations and competitive business environment, a number of organisations are collaborating with their supply chain (SC) partners, to conduct seamless SC operations. A systematic and structured literature review is carried out to observe and understand the past trends and extant patterns/themes in the SCI research area, evaluate contributions and summarise knowledge, thereby identifying limitations, implications and potential directions of further research. Thus, to trace the implementation of SCI practices, a profiling approach is used to analyse 293 articles (published in English-speaking peer-reviewed journals between 2000 and 2013) extracted from the Scopus database. The Systematic Review Approach proposed by Tranfield et al. (2003) was followed to analyse and synthesise the extant literature on SCI area. The analysis presented in this paper has identified relevant SCI research studies that have contributed to the development and accumulation of intellectual wealth to the SCI and SCM area. Each of the 293 papers was examined for achieving the aim and objectives of the research, the method of data collection, the data analysis method and quality measures. While some of the papers provided information on all of these categories, most of them failed to provide all the information, especially for Q2 and Q3 that resulted in 23 and 21 papers, respectively. This study would have benefited from the analysis of further journals; however, the analysis of 293 articles from leading journals in the field of operations and SCM was deemed sufficient in scope. Moreover, this research has implications for researchers, journal editors, practitioners, universities and research institutions. It is likely to form the basis and motivation for profiling other database resources and specific operations and SCM-type journals in this area. This systematic literature review highlights a taxonomy of contextual factors driving and inhibiting SCI for researchers and SC practitioners to refer to while researching or implementing SCI. It also exemplifies some areas for future research, along with the need for researchers to focus on developing more practical techniques for implementing SCI and improving organisational performance. The prime value and uniqueness of this paper lies in analysing and compiling the existing published material in relation to Q1, Q2 and Q3, including examining other variables (such as yearly publications, geographic location of each publication, type of publication, type of research methods used), which lacks in the recent published five SCI literature review-based articles (by Kim, 2013; Leuschner et al., 2013; Alfalla-Luque et al., 2013; Parente et al., 2008; Fabbe-Costes and Jahre, 2007). This has been achieved by extracting and synthesising existing publications using “Supply Chain Integration” keyword. This paper provides a critique of the conceptual and empirical works in SCI discipline and offers research agendas that can stimulate future researchers to carefully explore the topic.

This thesis deals with the integration of ICT services at the technological level. It mainly focuses on the integration of services which are provided by third parties and a user cannot change them. In this work are described the characteristics of web services and the typical methods for designing their application interface. Furthermore, are described various approaches to integration of applications at the technological level and some integration tools. As part of this thesis, was also created an application designed for integration of web services. This application can be categorized as message-oriented middleware. The aim was to create a simple application, which still meets basic requirements for this kind of applications. This thesis also contains a description of the created application and a description of problems that occurred during implementation. During the application development were used some integration design patterns, which are also described in this thesis.

<p>Företagsförvärv är en vanligt förkommande strategi för tillväxt och verksamhetsutveckling. Hur den förvärvande parten hanterar själva integrationsprocessen av den uppköpta verksamheten är av avgörande betydelse för möjligheten att realisera önskade samordningseffekter. Integrationsprocessens framgång är i sin tur beroende av de anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning under processen. Syftet med undersökningen är att studera hur hårda integrationsansatser påverkar de anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning i samband med ett företagsförvärv. Undersökningen studerar också huruvida det existerar samband mellan anställdas upplevda välmående och deras arbetsbelastning, samt hur upplevelserna skiljer sig åt mellan olika faser i integrationsprocessen. Undersökningen bygger på teorier om integrationsprocesser samt anställdas välmående och belastning, vilka bryts ner till fyra respektive tre förklarande variabler: oro, kommunikation, stress, kulturkrockar samt övertid, tilldelade uppgifter och informationsflöde. De teoretiska begreppen har sammanställts utifrån våra egna teoristudier. General Electric Company är ett av världens största företag med lång vana av företagsförvärv, vilka de ofta tar sig an med hårda integrationsansatser. Material har samlats in genom intervjuer med anställda på studieföretaget, numera känt som GE Healthcare.<strong> </strong>Undersökningens resultat visar att det existerar ett mindre, emellertid ej väsentligt, samband mellan anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning. De anställdas upplevelser varierar kraftigt mellan olika faser av integrationsprocessen, med de starkaste upplevelserna i det inledande stadiet. </p> / <p>Company acquisitions are commonly used strategies for growth and business development. How the acquiring party manages the process of integrating the acquired operations is critical to the ability to realize desired synergies. Integration process success is in turn dependent on the employees' well-being and perceived workload during the process. The purpose of this study is to explore how hard integration approaches affect employees' perceived well-being and work-load during the course of a company acquisition. The study focuses on determining whether there is any correlation between employees' perceived well-being and their workload, and how these experiences differ between different phases of the integration process.<strong> </strong>The study is based on theories of integration process elements and the well-being and workload of employees, which are broken down into four respectively three explaining variables: concern, communications, stress, culture clashes and overtime, assigned duties and flow of information. General Electric Company is one of the world's largest companies with long experience of acquisitions, which often takes on the hard integration approaches when acquiring other companies. Material was collected through interviews with staff from the company studied, now known as GE Healthcare.<strong> </strong>Results show that there exists a small, however not decisive, correlation between employees’ perceived well-being and workload. The employees' experiences vary to a large extent between different phases of the integration process, with the strongest experiences at the early stages.<strong></strong></p>

Företagsförvärv är en vanligt förkommande strategi för tillväxt och verksamhetsutveckling. Hur den förvärvande parten hanterar själva integrationsprocessen av den uppköpta verksamheten är av avgörande betydelse för möjligheten att realisera önskade samordningseffekter. Integrationsprocessens framgång är i sin tur beroende av de anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning under processen. Syftet med undersökningen är att studera hur hårda integrationsansatser påverkar de anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning i samband med ett företagsförvärv. Undersökningen studerar också huruvida det existerar samband mellan anställdas upplevda välmående och deras arbetsbelastning, samt hur upplevelserna skiljer sig åt mellan olika faser i integrationsprocessen. Undersökningen bygger på teorier om integrationsprocesser samt anställdas välmående och belastning, vilka bryts ner till fyra respektive tre förklarande variabler: oro, kommunikation, stress, kulturkrockar samt övertid, tilldelade uppgifter och informationsflöde. De teoretiska begreppen har sammanställts utifrån våra egna teoristudier. General Electric Company är ett av världens största företag med lång vana av företagsförvärv, vilka de ofta tar sig an med hårda integrationsansatser. Material har samlats in genom intervjuer med anställda på studieföretaget, numera känt som GE Healthcare. Undersökningens resultat visar att det existerar ett mindre, emellertid ej väsentligt, samband mellan anställdas upplevda välmående och belastning. De anställdas upplevelser varierar kraftigt mellan olika faser av integrationsprocessen, med de starkaste upplevelserna i det inledande stadiet. / Company acquisitions are commonly used strategies for growth and business development. How the acquiring party manages the process of integrating the acquired operations is critical to the ability to realize desired synergies. Integration process success is in turn dependent on the employees' well-being and perceived workload during the process. The purpose of this study is to explore how hard integration approaches affect employees' perceived well-being and work-load during the course of a company acquisition. The study focuses on determining whether there is any correlation between employees' perceived well-being and their workload, and how these experiences differ between different phases of the integration process. The study is based on theories of integration process elements and the well-being and workload of employees, which are broken down into four respectively three explaining variables: concern, communications, stress, culture clashes and overtime, assigned duties and flow of information. General Electric Company is one of the world's largest companies with long experience of acquisitions, which often takes on the hard integration approaches when acquiring other companies. Material was collected through interviews with staff from the company studied, now known as GE Healthcare. Results show that there exists a small, however not decisive, correlation between employees’ perceived well-being and workload. The employees' experiences vary to a large extent between different phases of the integration process, with the strongest experiences at the early stages.

Through mergers and acquisitions, automotive manufacturers can gain access to intellectual property and the ability to release advanced products and services at a faster pace and a decreased cost. This is achieved through integrating the product development capabilities of the merged or acquired companies. This study aimed to identify key success factors and challenges in product development integration by using the Traton Group as a case study, specifically two collaborations between their subsidiaries, Scania and Navistar. Interviews were performed with key product development resources at all three companies, as well as employees working in roles to enable collaboration within the Traton Group. The results confirm the importance of all success factors found in previous research on R&amp;D integrations and how the success factors impact each other. They also show how the collaborations between Scania and Navistar have evolved and improved over time. Finally, they highlight the importance of common IT tools as enablers of collaboration, particularly in collaborations with intensive software development work. The study compares Traton’s integration strategies against previous research, and concludes that Traton is on the right track. However, the interviewees' responses indicated a desire for increased involvement from the corporate parent Traton in the collaboration work. / Genom företagsförvärv kan fordonstillverkare få tillgång till immateriella rättigheter och möjligheten att släppa avancerade produkter och tjänster i snabbare takt och lägre kostnad. Detta uppnås genom att integrera produktutvecklingskapaciteten hos de sammanslagna eller förvärvade företagen. Denna studie syftade till att identifiera viktiga framgångsfaktorer och utmaningar i produktutvecklingsintegration genom att använda Traton Group som en fallstudie, närmare bestämt två samarbeten mellan deras dotterbolag Scania och Navistar. Intervjuer utfördes med produktutvecklingsresurser på alla tre företagen, samt anställda som arbetade att möjliggöra samarbete inom Traton Group. Resultaten bekräftar vikten av alla framgångsfaktorer som hittats i tidigare forskning om FoU-integrationer och hur framgångsfaktorerna påverkar varandra. De visar också hur samarbeten mellan Scania och Navistar har utvecklats och förbättrats över tid. Slutligen lyfter de fram vikten av gemensamma IT-verktyg som möjliggörare av samarbete, särskilt i samarbeten med intensivt mjukvaruutvecklingsarbete. Studien jämför Tratons integrationsstrategier med tidigare forskning, och drar slutsatsen att Traton är på rätt väg. Intervjupersonernas svar tydde dock på en önskan om ökat engagemang från företagsföräldern Traton i samverkansarbetet.