Temat för denna uppsats är - ökad service inom sjukvården. När ministrar – de högsta ansvariga för sjukvården - i en offentlig debattartikel efterlyser, ”att vården skall vara till för patienten och inte tvärtom” antyder det att sjukvården har problem när det gäller patient¬service. Uppsatsens empiriska material bekräftar denna bild. Vår avsikt med uppsatsen är att utforma en modell som kan vara ett verktyg i sjukvårdens arbete med att öka sin service till patienter. I uppsatsen undersöker vi möjligheterna till en patientdriven utveckling av service inom sjukvården. Vi har valt att arbeta med kvalitativ metod. Det innebär att vi tillämpar ett helhetsperspektiv på vår frågeställning vilket ger så stor förståelse som möjligt av det vi studerar. Uppsatsen ger en bakgrund till problem och tillgänglighet inom sjukvården, redogör för tidigare teorier och forskning inom området, redovisar empiriska undersökningar och visioner om en bättre sjukvård, beskriver den lagstiftning som reglerar området, och refererar patienters erfarenheter och upplevelser. Vi redogör även för utvecklingen inom organisationer – från management, till Service management, samt vårt resultat. Den föreslagna modellen ger förutsättningar för ökad service och tillgänglighet för patienten genom delaktighet och en maktförskjutning till patienten. Den ger också sjukvården ett verktyg för att utveckla sin verksamhet i samma riktning. Varje organisation kan utifrån sin ambition och sitt behov av förändring, själv finna sin väg. Innehållet i våra modeller kan ligga till grund för en sådan diskussion. Tillämpningen och resultatet av modellen kan skapa en stark sammanhållning i en organisation och möjliggöra ett gott klimat för förändring och en verklig förbättring för patienten. Att åstadkomma detta är dock ingen enkel kur.

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Bakgrund: I bakgrunden framgår det att den personliga kontakten med mejeriföretagen har minskat med tiden, vilket har resulterat i ett ökat avstånd mellan mejeriföretag och kund. Samtidigt präglas branschen av hög konkurrens. Det har blivit allt viktigare att arbeta för att behålla sina befintliga kunder. Problemformulering: Vilka faktorer är viktiga för mejeriföretagens långsiktiga överlevnad vid omvandling av en rutinmässig kärntjänst? Syfte: Att analysera och jämföra två beställningsmetoder för att se vilka faktorer som påverkar och bidrar till en långsiktig relation. Metod: Uppsatsen utgår från en deduktiv forskningsansats. Både kvalitativ och kvantitativ undersökningsmetod tillämpas i form av en djupintervju samt en kundenkät. Teorier: Uppsatsen använder följande teorier: Involveringsteorin, Mervärdesteorin, Nätverkssynsättet, Totalkommunikation samt Service profit chain. Uppsatsen utgår från ett Relationsmarknadsföringsperspektiv. Empiri: Empirin består uteslutande av primärdata från kundenkäten. Djupintervjuns huvudsakliga syfte var att få en förförståelse över mejeribranschen. Resultat: Resultatet visar på att ringkunderna är höginvolverade samt att orderwebbkunderna på lång sikt kan bli låginvolverade. Uppsatsförfattarna anser att övergången till orderwebben minskar Arla Foods förutsättningar för långsiktiga relationer. Slutsats: Kundrelationer, höginvolverade kunder, samarbete samt tillgänglighet är viktiga faktorer för mejeriföretagens långsiktiga överlevnad.

Background: The hotel market has become undiversified and the competition has increased rapidly. At the same time the environment aspects has been given higher priority and the trend continues to extend. A green marketing strategi has proven profitable if the company achieve a high credibility. Problem definition: What factors are important for hotel companies to attain long term business survival trough a green marketing strategy? Purpose: The purpose with this paper is to, trough a case study of Scandic Hotels analyze and find the relationship between trustworthy environmental work and internal factors. Method: This study is based on both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The qualitative data has been gathered through interviews with five different levels of personel, both management and employee, within the company. The quantitative data has been gathered through a customer survey. Discussion: Scandic Hotels have a well defined and comprehensible internal marketing. The company integrate the enviromental aspect in to all levels of the organisation and have established a high credibility. The combination of high involved customers and a well defined internal marketing as a strategy results in long term survival for Scandic Hotels. Conclusion: On the very competitive and undiversified hotel market a green profile could be crucial for a long term survival. The factors that are important when trying to establish a green profile is to make sure that the internal marketing is integrated with both employees and mangement. A well working internal marketing insures that all communications are interaktive, the company allows new knowledge to remain in the organisation and the management ensures the motivation of the employees by listening to their suggestions and informing them of the resluts of the green work.

The current Internet presents a high barrier to entry for new service providers, due to its inability to accommodate new protocols and technologies, and lack of competition among the network providers. Recently, network virtualization has gained considerable attention as a possible solution, as it enables multiple networks to concurrently run over a shared substrate. It allows for deploying diverse network protocols and technologies customized for specific networked services and applications. Moreover, any party can take on the role of a network provider by simply offering his virtual network infrastructure to customers, increasing competition in the market. However, the first challenge in realizing a fair and competitive market in a virtual network environment is to have a service negotiation and contracting mechanism in place, that will allow (i) multiple infrastructure providers to participate in a fair and faithful competition, and (ii) a service provider to negotiate the price and quality of service with the providers. In this thesis, we present V-Mart, an open market model and enabling framework for automated service negotiation and contracting in a virtual network environment. To the infrastructure providers, V-Mart fosters an open and fair competition realized by a two stage auction. The V-Mart auction model ensures that bidders (infrastructure providers) bid truthfully, have the flexibility to apply diverse pricing policies, and still gain profit from hosting customers’ virtual resources. To the service providers, V-Mart offers virtual network partitioning algorithms that allow them to divide their virtual networks among competing infrastructure providers while minimizing the total cost. V-Mart offers two types of algorithms to suit different market scenarios. The algorithms not only consider virtual resource hosting price but also the service provider’s preference for resource co-location and the high cost of inter-provider communication. Through extensive simulation experiments we show the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms under various market conditions.

During the last decades the importance of IT has increased for businesses all over the world. It has transferred from only being used in administrative purposes to become more integrated to the core business. Due to the financial crisis in 2009 and increasing globalization, IT is facing the challenge of lower costs and increased efficiency. This requires IT-departments to embrace new strategies in order to fulfill these new tougher demands. Lean is a business development concept that aims to lower costs through more effective processes by removing all activities that does not create any value from the end customer’s perspective. Lean originates from Toyota’s Production System, TPS but is today used by healthcare providers, banks and IT-departments. This master thesis aims to develop a tool that can assess the opportunities for an IT-department to increase its efficiency through the use of Lean. This tool has been developed in cooperation with Niklas Larsson and is to be used by management and IT consulting company Connecta AB. To ensure that the tool is useful for the company four goals have been defined. They are that the tool should be reliable, should not require large amounts of resources, should be user friendly and identify areas that can be improvement through the implementation of Lean. The Lean IT Assessment Tool has been developed through interviews with consultants at Connecta, studies of literature and articles about Lean and Lean IT. The tool consists of three parts. The first part assesses the maturity of the IT-department from a Lean perspective. The second part is a questionnaire that aims to identify the employees’ attitude toward their work environment. The third is a value stream map, VSM, which aims to identify problems and bottlenecks in a specific IT-process. To ensure that the goals were met the tool was tested at a representative IT-department. The conclusions were that they were all reached and the continuation of the work is now left to Connecta AB.

Relationships have become more essential today considering that the business environment consists of many actors competing over the same customers. Relationships imply great advantages, for both the companies and the customers, and involve knowledge exchange. This implies that the companies are able to understand and tailor their offering to suit the specific needs of the customers. To understand how the customers perceive a company’s offering it might be useful to assess the dimensions regarding service quality. A company needs to be aware of what they are promising in order to achieve this. The purpose of this thesis is to identify essential aspects that affect the customer satisfaction in the relationship between a wholesale company and a specialized retailer. In order to fulfill our purpose a case study was conducted of the wholesale company Dogman. To be able to understand Dogman’s relationships with their retailers, five service quality determinants were used. Our research indicates that four aspects; information, knowledge, salespeople and responsiveness, are essential for customer satisfaction and long-lasting relationships.

Ett av de idag mest populära processbaserade sätten att utveckla verk­sam­heter är förbättringsarbete baserat på Lean. Konceptet har sitt ursprung inom bilindustrin och har gett avsevärda förbättringar av prestanda och produktivitet inom tillverkningsindustrin. Dessa har emellertid främst rört själva tillverkningen och inte de övriga delarna av verksamheten, som de administrativa tjänster kontoret tillhandahåller. Många forskare anser att Lean är universellt och kan tillämpas på alla slags processer. Tolkningen av konceptet behöver emellertid anpassas eftersom för­ut­sättningar­na skiljer sig åt mellan olika kontexter. Skillnaderna mellan tillverknings- och tjänstekontexter får vissa forskare att varna för att förbättringsarbete i tjänstesammanhang riskerar att skada företagens konkurrensförmåga om det bygger på en till­verk­nings­baserad logik. Syftet med studien är att beskriva hur tillverkande företag som arbetar med Lean i produk­tionen tolkar Lean på kontoret. För att uppfylla syftet genom­fördes en kvalitativ undersökning bestående av intervjuer på fyra svenska tillverkande företag som deltagit i Produktions­lyftet. Studien visar att de deltagande företagen ser Lean som tillämpbart på alla slags processer, men att de i praktiken upplever att konceptet är svårare att använda i kontorskontexten än i fabrikskontexten. Resultaten visar också att företagen ännu inte fullt ut tagit till sig en kundfokuserad logik, vilket kan innebära en risk för att delar av förbättringsarbetet avseende tjänste­processer skadar deras konkurrens­förmåga.

The current Internet presents a high barrier to entry for new service providers, due to its inability to accommodate new protocols and technologies, and lack of competition among the network providers. Recently, network virtualization has gained considerable attention as a possible solution, as it enables multiple networks to concurrently run over a shared substrate. It allows for deploying diverse network protocols and technologies customized for specific networked services and applications. Moreover, any party can take on the role of a network provider by simply offering his virtual network infrastructure to customers, increasing competition in the market. However, the first challenge in realizing a fair and competitive market in a virtual network environment is to have a service negotiation and contracting mechanism in place, that will allow (i) multiple infrastructure providers to participate in a fair and faithful competition, and (ii) a service provider to negotiate the price and quality of service with the providers. In this thesis, we present V-Mart, an open market model and enabling framework for automated service negotiation and contracting in a virtual network environment. To the infrastructure providers, V-Mart fosters an open and fair competition realized by a two stage auction. The V-Mart auction model ensures that bidders (infrastructure providers) bid truthfully, have the flexibility to apply diverse pricing policies, and still gain profit from hosting customers’ virtual resources. To the service providers, V-Mart offers virtual network partitioning algorithms that allow them to divide their virtual networks among competing infrastructure providers while minimizing the total cost. V-Mart offers two types of algorithms to suit different market scenarios. The algorithms not only consider virtual resource hosting price but also the service provider’s preference for resource co-location and the high cost of inter-provider communication. Through extensive simulation experiments we show the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithms under various market conditions.

The purpose with the thesis is to analyze and investigate the purpose of the co-operations between different brands within the hotel sector. We differentiate these purposes of the collaborations in regard to connections to quality- and environmental oriented symbols.