Research shows that climate changes we face today is a consequence of the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that circulate in our atmosphere due to increased human industrial activity. Many firms and industries are therefore increasingly implementing environmental management strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions towards a more sustainable environment. These environmental management efforts can be broadly classified under two umbrellas which are sustainable production and sustainable consumption and these two parts need to work together in order to contribute effectively towards a more sustainable environment. The environmental management literature however reveals a gap between sustainable production and sustainable use of vehicles in the automotive industry showing that while the major global environmental impact - greenhouse gas emissions - occurs when vehicles are put to use, the environmental management efforts in the industry are skewed to the production of vehicles.An emerging trend to breach this gap is that vehicle manufacturers are providing extending services to help vehicle users minimize their greenhouse gas emissions. This study analyses the extended service packages of the global truck manufacturer, Scania, against the environmental objectives and initiatives of five road transport companies in Sweden. An exploratory case study approach was used from the perspective of the road freight transport companies to find out if extended services present suitable opportunities to extend environmental management from manufacturers to users in the road freight transport industry. The study found that the extended services provide solutions that help road freighttransport companies to achieve lower fuel consumption and lower emissions from theirvehicles. Road freight transport companies traditionally invest in environmental initiatives to gain marketing advantages but the extended services present a rare opportunity to the companies to compete on profit margins by investing in the extended services. / Market Making of a High-value Business Model in Low Cost Markets: Value Co-Creation in Swedish Industry, CeLS, Project manager: Leif-Magnus Jensen, leif-magnus.jensen@jibs.hj.se, +46 36 10 1881.

Over the last decade, Internet-based services, such as electronic-mail, music-on-demand, and social-network services, have changed the ways we communicate and access information. Usually, the key functionality of such a service is in backend components, which are located in a data center, a facility for hosting computing systems and related equipment. This thesis focuses on two fundamental problems related to the management, dimensioning, and provisioning of such backend components. The first problem centers around resource allocation for a large-scale cloud environment. Data centers have become very large; they often contain hundreds of thousands of machines and applications. In such a data center, resource allocation cannot be efficiently achieved through a traditional management system that is centralized in nature. Therefore, a more scalable solution is needed. To address this problem, we have developed and evaluated a scalable and generic protocol for resource allocation. The protocol is generic in the sense that it can be instantiated for different management objectives through objective functions. The protocol jointly allocates CPU, memory, and network resources to applications that are hosted by the cloud. We prove that the protocol converges to a solution, if an objective function satisfies a certain property. We perform a simulation study of the protocol for realistic scenarios. Simulation results suggest that the quality of the allocation is independent of the system size, up to 100,000 machines and applications, for the management objectives considered. The second problem is related to performance modeling of a distributed key-value store. The specific distributed key-value store we focus on in this thesis is the Spotify storage system. Understanding the performance of the Spotify storage system is essential for achieving a key quality of service objective, namely that the playback latency of a song is sufficiently low. To address this problem, we have developed and evaluated models for predicting the performance of a distributed key-value store for a lightly loaded system. First, we developed a model that allows us to predict the response time distribution of requests. Second, we modeled the capacity of the distributed key-value store for two different object allocation policies. We evaluate the models by comparing model predictions with measurements from two different environments: our lab testbed and a Spotify operational environment. We found that the models are accurate in the sense that the prediction error, i.e., the difference between the model predictions and the measurements from the real systems, is at most 11%. / <p>QC 20131001</p>

Abstrakt (Svenska) - Vikten av att ha effektiv hantering av kundrelationer (CRM) inom företag väger mycket, för att på ett lyckat sätt öka förståelsen och samarbeten med kunder. Företag ändrar eller uppdaterar sina CRM system för att kunna öka arbetseffektiviteten. Kunder och marknad utvecklas ständigt, och för att kunna följa upp med större datamängder och ökad konkurrens bör företag använda sig utav effektiva sätt att arbeta på, när det gäller hjälp med att göra data mer tillgängligt. Om företag inte framgångsrikt integrerar sina CRM system kan de halka efter och försämras. Ett byte gällande CRM är oftast bestämt av ledning och ifrågasatt av de faktiska användarna. Mottagarna av förändringen upplever ofta osäkerhet och tvivel. I denna avhandling beskriver vi hur vår forskning kring CRM processer, CRM system och intressenterna i fallföretaget, leder till att hitta utmaningar och behov. Vårt främsta bidrag är vår analys av rekommendationer baserade på våra resultat, som kan användas som underlag för att skapa en kravspecifikation av fallföretaget. Med de empiriska uppgifter som samlas in i vår avhandling strävar vi efter att hjälpa fallföretaget och andra organisationer i deras process att implementera ett nytt CRM system. / Abstract (English) - Efficient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is critical for successful understanding and collaboration with Customers. Companies frequently change or update their CRM systems in order to increase their work effectiveness. Customers and markets are always evolving and in order to keep up with increasing amounts of data and competition, companies should use efficient ways of working, regarding assistance in making data more accessible. If companies do not successfully integrate their CRM systems they risk falling behind other possible competitors and deteriorate. Change is often approved by those who are commanding it and questioned by those who receive it. The recipients of the change often experience uncertainty and hesitation. In this thesis, we describe how our research of CRM process, CRM systems and the stakeholders within the case company lead to finding challenges and needs. Our main contribution is the analysis of recommendations based on our findings, which can be used as a basis for creating a requirement specification in the context of integrating a new CRM system. With the empirical data collected in our thesis, and with the literature that we reviewed, we aim to assist the case company and other organizations in their process of implementing a new CRM system.

L’objectif général de la thèse est de modéliser les principaux processus biologiques et économiques régissant des pêcheries multi-espèces et multi-flottilles afin de proposer des stratégies viables pour la gestion durable de ces pêcheries mixtes, dans un contexte stochastique et multiobjectif. Plus spécifiquement, cette thèse utilise des analyses de co-viabilité stochastique pour étudier les arbitrages entre des objectifs contradictoires de gestion (conservation, et viabilité économique et sociale) des pêcheries mixtes. Deux pêcheries mixtes sont analysées dans cette thèse : la pêcherie française mixte démersale du golfe de Gascogne et la pêcherie crevettière australienne du Nord (NPF). Ces deux pêcheries sont multi-espèces, et utilisent des stratégies multiples de pêche, induisant des impacts directs et indirects sur les écosystèmes. Cette thèse propose une application de la co-viabilité stochastique à ces deux cas, en prenant en compte leur histoire, leur contexte socio-politique et les différences dans les stratégies et objectifs de gestion. Les résultats suggèrent que le status quo peut être considéré comme une stratégie biologiquement durable mais socio économiquement à risque dans les deux pêcheries (ainsi qu’à risque écologique dans le cas de la pêcherie australienne). Les simulations réalisées pour le golfe de Gascogne permettent de comparer les arbitrages associés à différentes réductions de capacités par flottille et de montrer qu’il existe des solutions de gestion permettant la co-viabilité du système (viabilité biologique des différentes espèces considérées et viabilité socio-économique des flottilles) contrairement à des stratégies de gestion mono-spécifiques ou basées sur la maximisation de la rente. Dans la pêcherie crevettière australienne, l’analyse montre que les stratégies de diversification permettent de limiter le risque économique contrairement aux stratégies plus spécialisées. / Empirical evidence and the theoretical literature both point to stock sustainability and the protection of marine biodiversity as important fisheries management issues. Decision-support tools are increasingly required to operationalize the ecosystem-based approach to fisheries management. These tools need to integrate (i) ecological and socio-economic drivers of changes in fisheries and ecosystems; (ii) complex dynamics; (iii) deal with various sources of uncertainty; and (iv) incorporate multiple, rather than single objectives. The stochastic co-viability approach addresses the trade-offs associated with balancing ecological, economic and social objectives throughout time, and takes into account the complexity and uncertainty of the dynamic interactions which characterize exploited ecosystems and biodiversity. This thesis proposes an application of this co-viability approach to the sustainable management of mixed fisheries, using two contrasting case studies: the French Bay of Biscay (BoB) demersal mixed fishery and the Australian Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF). Both fisheries entail direct and indirect impacts on mixed species communities while also generating large economic returns. Their sustainability is therefore a major societal concern. A dynamic bio-economic modelling approach is used to capture the key biological and economic processes governing these fisheries, combining age- (BoB) or size- (NPF) structured models of multiple species with recruitment uncertainty, and multiple fleets (BoB) or fishing strategies (NPF). Economic uncertainties relating to input and output prices are also considered. The bioeconomic models are used to investigate how the fisheries can operate within a set of constraints relating to the preservation of Spawning Stock Biomasses (BoB) or Spawning Stock Size Indices (NPF) of a set of key target species, maintenance of the economic profitability of various fleets (BoB) or the fishery as a whole (NPF), and limitation of fishing impacts on the broader biodiversity (NPF), under a range of alternative scenarios and management strategies. Results suggest that under a status quo strategy both fisheries can be considered as biologically sustainable, while socio-economically (and ecologically in the NPF case) at risk. Despite very different management contexts and objectives, viable management strategies suggest a reduction in the number of vessels in both cases. The BoB simulations allow comparison of the trade-offs associated with different allocations of this decrease across fleets. Notably, co-viability management strategies entail a more equitable allocation of effort reductions compared to strategies aiming at maximizing economic yield. In the NPF, species catch diversification strategies are shown to perform well in controlling the levels of economic risk, by contrast with more specialized fishing strategies. Furthermore analyses emphasize the importance to the fishing industry of balancing global economic performance with inter-annual economic variability. Promising future developments based on this research involve the incorporation of a broader set of objectives including social dimensions, as well as the integration of ecological interactions, to better address the needs of ecosystem-based approaches to the sustainable harvesting of marine biodiversity.