The Challenge of Component Purchasing Excellence – a Case Study at Nahoj Nim

Nahoj Nim has for a long time been very successful at developing, producing and selling packaging solutions for the food industry. Today, however, Nahoj Nim faces a new challenge as competitors are gaining market shares. The purchasing unit Component & Technical Consultant Purchasing (hereafter referred to as C&TCP), involved in sourcing, contracting and managing the supplier base for components and technical consultants, have until now had no or little involvement in the product development and production processes. In product development the designers have historically had the liberty to choose components and parts as well as suppliers simply by technology standards. No or little attention has been directed towards the commercial aspects, which has lead to a proliferation of different components used and the supplier base has grown rapidly. As Nahoj Nim faces new challenges, so does C&TCP. In order to be able to support the business with an efficient and structured purchasing of components and technical consultants C&TCP needs to make some changes. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze the purchasing function Component & Technical Consultant Purchasing and to suggest organizational changes in order to achieve purchasing excellence. Methodology: The research has been conducted as a descriptive case-study in order to do an in-depth analysis of the present situation. The qualitative collection of the primary empirical data has mainly been made by numerous interviews, internally at C&TCP as well as externally with key informants at Nahoj Nim in Lund, Sweden, and Modena, Italy. The secondary data has been gathered from written sources; literature, articles and e-sources. Conclusions: The purchasing of components and technical consultants at C&TCP is today merely 25 percent as efficient as the most prominent purchasing organizations world-wide. The department is organizationally placed in contradiction to the responsibility of being a global purchasing function for Nahoj Nim. By not being active before or beyond the contracting part of the supply chain, C&TCP lacks influence and information needed to manage the supplier base efficiently. In order to excel, operational as well as strategic changes are required. In addition, Nahoj Nim would profit from C&TCP being more actively involved in product development by possibly lowering the total life-cycle-costs, improving quality and provide the internal customers with a high quality supplier base

"Gör det rätta gör slut med Cloetta"

Anti-branding is a phenomenon more and more commonly used to aim criticism toward companies. Despite this, research in the area of anti-branding is scarce. The purpose of this study is to contribute research on the topic by examining how an organization can work with an anti-branding campaign against a company in order to influence and actuate change. The study is based on a qualitative case study, where the empirical evidence was gathered by semi-structured interviews, qualitative content analysis and an online observation. The results show that an anti-branding campaign is an efficient tool to influence and actuate change. Anti-branding makes it possible for an organization to redefine a brand and assign negative associations to it. The study has also shown that an antibranding campaign can create involvement on social media and thus create pressure from the consumers. New digital tools, most prominent the social network Facebook, allow organizations to be interactive with its publics and invite them to be co-creators of anti-branding campaigns and their message

Greenhouse production contributes to pesticide occurrences in Swedish streams

Greenhouse and other covered cultivation systems have increased globally over the past several decades, leading to considerably improved product quality and productivity per land area unit. However, there is a paucity in information regarding the environmental impacts of covered production systems, especially regarding pesticides entering the surrounding environment. Aiming to address this knowledge gap, we collected grab samples downstream of greenhouses from seven Swedish streams every 14 days during a 12 month period. In three of the streams, samples were also taken upstream of the greenhouses and in four of the streams time-integrated samples were collected by TIMFIE samplers in the period between grab sampling occasions. The samples were analyzed for 28 substances (27 that were permitted for use in greenhouse production systems in Sweden and one degradation product to a permitted substance). Pesticide use journals were collected from the greenhouse producers for the 12 month period. The results were examined for indications of greenhouse contributions to detection frequencies, maximum and average concentrations, and potential ecotoxicicity in several ways: (1) comparing locations downstream of greenhouses with registered use of a substance with those without registered use, (2) comparing results from this study with those from the Swedish environmental monitoring program of pesticides in surface water from catchments with no greenhouses from the same period and region, (3) comparing concentration trends with registered pesticide application times in the greenhouses, and (4) comparing up-and downstream concentrations. The results strongly suggest that greenhouse applications do contribute to pesticide occurrences, maximum and median concentrations for most of the pesticides included in this study, and to potential toxicity to aquatic organisms for several of them, most notably imidacloprid, acetamiprid, carbendazim, and pirimicarb

”Om vi visar att vi tycker läsning är kul kanske det motiverar någon mer” : En studie om hur undervisning utvecklar elevernas läsförståelse och deras motivation att läsa.

The aim of this study is to clarify and concretize how teachers in grades 4-6 work with reading comprehension and how they motivate students to read. This study also aims to review teaching material that teachers use when working with reading comprehension. This study contains a qualitative group interview with teachers within the Swedish subject grading 4-6, as well as an analysis of the study material. The Material consists of the fictional book Brorsan är kung and the teacher´s guide. In the analysis, the content is reviewed and connected to motivation, the possibility to develop reading comprehension and the degree of difficulty of the book. The result of the interview shows that the choice of book from an interest standpoint is essential when motivating the students to read. Furthermore, it also shows that the interview teachers work in different ways when it comes to reading and that they utilize different strategies in order to increase the students reading comprehension. This study is closely connected to the pragmatic perspective when it comes to reading books that are close to the students' reality and interests. Also, the study is in line with the sociocultural perspective which indicates that learning comes from interaction with the environment.

En bild säger mer än tusen ord : En undersökning om visuellt berättande

This article examines visual storytelling and how visual artefacts could be used to communicate a specific message to several different interactors. Often when a person analyzes an image, the person's analysis is affected by her previous experiences, what is currently relevant in her everyday life and what associations the person has to different colors and objects in the image. This type of analysis commonly results in many different narratives of one and the same image. This article investigates the opposite, the goal is to create several similar analyses/interpretations of the same image, in this case the narrative of a children’s book. To investigate this, an artefact was created in the form of a children's book. The purpose of the book is to test different theories in visual storytelling with focus on visual communication, environment construction within illustration and character design. To test the theories, I have chosen to remove all text in the book, this resulted in a children's book without text where the interactive part, instead of reading would be image interpretation. The design is tested using personal tests in the form of interviews, I asked children aged 3-6 years old to interpret the design and come up with their own story for the illustrations in the book to see if they interpreted the book "correctly"

En bild säger mer än tusen ord : En undersökning om visuellt berättande

This article examines visual storytelling and how visual artefacts could be used to communicate a specific message to several different interactors. Often when a person analyzes an image, the person's analysis is affected by her previous experiences, what is currently relevant in her everyday life and what associations the person has to different colors and objects in the image. This type of analysis commonly results in many different narratives of one and the same image. This article investigates the opposite, the goal is to create several similar analyses/interpretations of the same image, in this case the narrative of a children’s book. To investigate this, an artefact was created in the form of a children's book. The purpose of the book is to test different theories in visual storytelling with focus on visual communication, environment construction within illustration and character design. To test the theories, I have chosen to remove all text in the book, this resulted in a children's book without text where the interactive part, instead of reading would be image interpretation. The design is tested using personal tests in the form of interviews, I asked children aged 3-6 years old to interpret the design and come up with their own story for the illustrations in the book to see if they interpreted the book "correctly"