Business Development Efforts and Performance Improvements in SMEs Case Study of Business Development Projects Implemented in SME

Under the circumstances of the increasing market pressure, enterprises try to improve their competitive position by development efforts, and a business development project is one tool for that. There are not many answers to the question of how the development projects launched to improve the business performance in SMEs have succeeded. Theacademic interest in the business development project success has mainly focused on projects implemented in larger organisations rather than in SMEs. The previous studies on the business success of SMEs have mainly focused on new business ventures rather than on existing SMEs. However, nowadays a large number of business development projects are undertaken in existing SMEs, where they can pose a great challenge. This study focuses on business development success in SMEs thathave already established their business. The objective of the present study is to gain a deep understanding on business development project success in the SME-context and to identify the dimensions and factors affecting the project success. Further, the aim is to clarify how the business development projects implemented in SMEs have affected their performance. The empirical evidence is based on multiple case study. This study builds a framework for a generic theory of business development success in the SME-context, based on literature from the areas ofproject and change management, entrepreneurship and small business management, as well as performance measurement, and on empirical evidence from SMES. The framework consists of five success dimensions: entrepreneurial, project preparation, change management, project management and project success. The framework provides a systematic way for analysing the business development project and its impact on the performance and on the performing company. This case evidence indicates that successful business development projects have a balanced, high performance concerning all the dimensions. Good performance in one dimension is not enoughfor the project success, but it gives a good ground for the other dimensions. The other way round, poor performance in one success dimension affects the others, leading to poor performance of the project. In the SME-context the business development project success seems to be dependent on several interrelated dimensions and factors. Success in one area leads to success in other areas, and so creates an upward success spiral. Failure in one area seems to lead to failure in other areas, creating a downward failure spiral. The study indicates that the internal business development projects have affected the SMEs' performance widely also on areas and functions not initially targeted. The implications cover all thesuccess categories: the project efficiency, the impact on the customer, the business success and the future potentiality. With successful cases, the success tends to spread out to areas and functions not mentioned as the project goals, andwith unsuccessful cases the failure seems to spread out widely to the SMEs' other functions. This study also indicates that the most important key factors for successful business development project implementation are the strength of intention, business ability, knowledge, motivation and participation of the employees, as well as adequate and well-timed training provided to the employees.

The long run impact of mergers and acquisitions on performance – empirical study in the pulp and paper industry

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have played very important role in restructuring the pulp and paper industry (PPI). The poor performance and fragmented nature of the industry, overcapacity problems, and globalisation have driven companies to consolidate. The objective of this thesis was to examine how PPI acquirers’ have performed subsequent M&As and whether the deal characteristics have had any impact on performance. Based on the results it seems that PPI companies have not been able to enhance their performance in the long run after M&As although the per-formance of acquiring firms has remained above the industry median, and deal characteristics or the amount of premiums paid do not seem to have had any effect. The statistical significance of the results was tested with change model and regression analysis. Performance was assessed with accrual, cash flow, and market based indicators. Results are congruent with behavioural theory: managers and investors seem to be overoptimistic in determining the synergies from M&As.

Benchmarking Symbian OS smartphones

Diplomityön tarkoituksena oli luoda menetelmä Symbian-käyttöjärjestelmää käyttävien älypuhelinten suorituskyvyn määrittämiseen, jotta laitteiden välisiä eroja voitaisiin mitata. Aluksi Symbian-käyttöjärjestelmää ja älypuhelinlaitteistoja tutkittiin suorituskykyyn ja sen vaihteluun vaikuttavien tekijöiden ja osien löytämiseksi. Tämän jälkeen kehitettiin useita testitapauksia sisältävä testikirjasto, jolla voitiin mitata joidenkin suorituskykyyn vaikuttavien käyttöjärjestelmän rajapintojen suoritusaikoja. Testikirjaston testit ajettiin kolmella eri älypuhelinmallilla, jotta testien toimivuutta voitiin arvioida. Lopuksi testituloksia analysoitiin mahdollisten pullonkaulojen havaitsemiseksi suorituskyvystä. Testikirjaston pystyttiin havaitsemaan eroja laitteiden suorituskyvyssä. Viimeisin, uudella Symbianin EKA2-ytimellä varustettu älypuhelin, Nokia E70, jäi mittauksissa viimeiseksi, koska se pärjäsi huonosti muistinvarauksia ja TRAP-poikkeuksia testaavissa tapauksissa. Muilla mitatuilla osa-alueilla se kuitenkin päihitti selvästi muut testatut puhelimet, Nokia N90:n ja Nokia 6630:n. Näiden kahden muun laitteen tulosten skaalan tasaisuus osoittaa, että kehitetyn testikirjaston avulla saadaan johdonmukaisia ja uskottavia mittaustuloksia.

Jatkuvatoimisen sellukeittimen säätöjen suorituskyvyn analysointi

Työssä tarkastellaan yleisiä menetelmiä säätöpiirien suorituskyvyn analysointiin ja sovelletaan niitä jatkuvatoimisen sellukeittimen säätöihin. Esitellyt menetelmät tarjoavat keinoja myös huonon säätötuloksen syyn selvittämiseen ja vinkkejä paremman suorituskyvyn saavuttamiseksi. Analyysissä edettiin top-down periaatteen mukaisesti lähtien liikkeelle keittimen tärkeimmästä säädöstä eli kappaluvun säädöstä. Sitten etsittiin tähän vaikuttavia tekijöitä mitatuista suureista. Seuraavaksi arvioitiin tärkeimmäksi katsotun tekijän (hakepinnankorkeus) säädön suorituskyky, jossa havaittiin parannettavaa. Lopuksi hakepinnankorkeuden säädön viritystämuutettiin ja tehtiin identifiointikoe säätörakenteen uudelleen järjestelyä varten.

Yritysjärjestelyiden vaikutus lyhyen aikavälin osaketuottoihin ja pitkän aikavälin kannattavuuteen Suomen markkinoilla

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on selvittää yritysjärjestelyiden vaikutuksia Suomen markkinoilla, sekä tutkia onko yritysjärjestelyiden eroavaisuuksilla vaikutusta menestymiseen. Yritysjärjestelyt ryhmitellään maksutavan, koon, kansainvälisyyden ja markkina-arvo/kirja-arvon perusteella. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu 31 yritysjärjestelystä, joissa ainakin toinen osapuoli on ilmoitushetkellä ollut listattuna Helsingin pörssiin. Tutkimukseen valitut yritysjärjestelyt ovat tapahtuneet vuosien 1999-2007 välillä. Tutkimus suoritetaan kahdella eri menetelmällä: markkinaperusteisia tuottoja ja yritysten taloudellista informaatiota analysoimalla. Markkinaperusteisia tuottoja tutkitaan epänormaaleiden tuottojen avulla. Taloudelliseen informaatioon perustuvaa kannattavuutta tutkitaan kassavirran ja operatiivisen tuloksen avulla, jotka suhteutetaan yritysten markkina-arvoon ja liikevaihtoon. Empiiristen tulosten mukaan yritysjärjestelyt tuottavat ostettavan yrityksen osakkeenomistajille epänormaaleita tuottoja ja ostavan yrityksen osakkeenomistajille nollatuottoja. Tulokset ovat samankaltaisia kuin kansainvälisellä aineistolla aiemmin saadut. Taloudelliseen informaatioon perustuvat tulokset ovat ristiriitaisia mutta niistä on havaittavissa heikohko menestyminen yhdistymisen jälkeen.

Ylioptimismin Vaikutus Listautumisantien Alihinnoitteluun Suomen Markkinoilla

Osakeyhtiöiden pörssiin listautumisia tutkittaessa on yleisesti huomattu, että ensimmäisen listautumispäivän aikana kyseisten yhtiöiden osakkeiden tarjoamat tuotot ovat poikkeuksellisen suuria. Kyseinen ilmiö tunnetaan yleisesti listautumisannin alihinnoittelun anomaliana. Listautumisista keskusteltaessa teorioita on luotu kolmesta eri anomaliasta; (i) uusien osakkeiden alihinnoittelu, (ii) alihinnoittelun syklisyys (Ritter, 1984) ja (iii) alihinnoitellun listautumisannin pitkän aikavälin huono menestyminen (Ritter, 1991). Useat tutkimukset (mm. Beatty ja Ritter, 1986) osoittavat, että ainoastaan maltillinen alihinnoittelu on edukasta listautuvalle yritykselle, mutta ennen kaikkea annin järjestäjälle. Lisäksi mm. Shillerin (1990) tekemä kyselytutkimus, jonka mukaan suurin osa sijoittajista ei perusta listautuvaan yritykseen kohdistuvia sijoituksiaan fundamentteihin, osoittaa, että tuotot eivät ole puhtaasti seurausta ainoastaan alihinnoittelusta. Tämä tutkimus pyrkii määrittelemään aiemmin vähäisesti tutkittua markkinoiden ylioptimismin vaikutusta listautumisannin jälkeisiin ensimmäisen päivän tuottoihin (alihinnoitteluun), käyttämällä aiempien tutkimusten tuloksia ja perusteltuja päätelmiä teoriapohjan luonnissa. Luotua teoriaa testataan empiirisesti käyttäen hyödyksi Helsingin pörssiin (OMXH) listautuneista yrityksistä vuodesta 1998 vuoden 2007 loppuun kerättyä dataa. Aineiston tuottamat tulokset tukivat aiempaa kirjallisuutta. Lisäksi tutkimuksista kyettiin toteamaan, että ylioptimismilla on vaikutusta listautumisantien jälkeisissä lyhyen aikavälin tuotoissa. Tuloksiin on kuitenkin suhtauduttava kriittisesti pienen aineistokoon takia.

Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity in the Development of Early Mathematical Skills

The aim of the present set of longitudinal studies was to explore 3-7-year-old children.s Spontaneous FOcusing on Numerosity (SFON) and its relation to early mathematical development. The specific goals were to capture in method and theory the distinct process by which children focus on numerosity as a part of their activities involving exact number recognition, and individual differences in this process that may be informative in the development of more complex number skills. Over the course of conducting the five studies, fifteen novel tasks were progressively developed for the SFON assessments. In the tasks, confounding effects of insufficient number recognition, verbal comprehension, other procedural skills as well as working memory capacity were aimed to be controlled. Furthermore, how children.s individual differences in SFON are related to their development of number sequence, subitizing-based enumeration, object counting and basic arithmetic skills was explored. The effect of social interaction on SFON was tested. Study I captured the first phase of the 3-year longitudinal study with 39 children. It was investigated whether there were differences in 3-year-old children.s tendency to focus on numerosity, and whether these differences were related to the children.s development of cardinality recognition skills from the age of 3 to 4 years. It was found that the two groups of children formed on the basis of their amount of SFON tendency at the age of 3 years differed in their development of recognising and producing small numbers. The children whose SFON tendency was very predominant developed faster in cardinality related skills from the age of 3 to 4 years than the children whose SFON tendency was not as predominant. Thus, children.s development in cardinality recognition skills is related to their SFON tendency. Studies II and III were conducted to investigate, firstly, children.s individual differences in SFON, and, secondly, whether children.s SFON is related to their counting development. Altogether nine tasks were designed for the assessments of spontaneous and guided focusing on numerosity. The longitudinal data of 39 children in Study II from the age of 3.5 to 6 years showed individual differences in SFON at the ages of 4, 5 and 6 years, as well as stability in children.s SFON across tasks used at different ages. The counting skills were assessed at the ages of 3.5, 5 and 6 years. Path analyses indicated a reciprocal tendency in the relationship between SFON and counting development. In Study III, these results on the individual differences in SFON tendency, the stability of SFON across different tasks and the relationship of SFON and mathematical skills were confirmed by a larger-scale cross-sectional study of 183 on average 6.5-year-old children (range 6;0-7;0 years). The significant amount of unique variance that SFON accounted for number sequence elaboration, object counting and basic arithmetic skills stayed statistically significant (partial correlations varying from .27 to .37) when the effects of non-verbal IQ and verbal comprehension were controlled. In addition, to confirm that the SFON tasks assess SFON tendency independently from enumeration skills, guided focusing tasks were used for children who had failed in SFON tasks. It was explored whether these children were able to proceed in similar tasks to SFON tasks once they were guided to focus on number. The results showed that these children.s poor performance in the SFON tasks was not caused by their deficiency in executing the tasks but on lacking focusing on numerosity. The longitudinal Study IV of 39 children aimed at increasing the knowledge of associations between children.s long-term SFON tendency, subitizing-based enumeration and verbal counting skills. Children were tested twice at the age of 4-5 years on their SFON, and once at the age of 5 on their subitizing-based enumeration, number sequence production, as well as on their skills for counting of objects. Results showed considerable stability in SFON tendency measured at different ages, and that there is a positive direct association between SFON and number sequence production. The association between SFON and object counting skills was significantly mediated by subitizing-based enumeration. These results indicate that the associations between the child.s SFON and sub-skills of verbal counting may differ on the basis of how significant a role understanding the cardinal meanings of number words plays in learning these skills. The specific goal of Study V was to investigate whether it is possible to enhance 3-year old children.s SFON tendency, and thus start children.s deliberate practice in early mathematical skills. Participants were 3-year-old children in Finnish day care. The SFON scores and cardinality-related skills of the experimental group of 17 children were compared to the corresponding results of the 17 children in the control group. The results show an experimental effect on SFON tendency and subsequent development in cardinality-related skills during the 6-month period from pretest to delayed posttest in the children with some initial SFON tendency in the experimental group. Social interaction has an effect on children.s SFON tendency. The results of the five studies assert that within a child.s existing mathematical competence, it is possible to distinguish a separate process, which refers to the child.s tendency to spontaneously focus on numerosity. Moreover, there are significant individual differences in children.s SFON at the age of 3-7 years. Moderate stability was found in this tendency across different tasks assessed both at the same and at different ages. Furthermore, SFON tendency is related to the development of early mathematical skills. Educational implications of the findings emphasise, first, the importance of regarding focusing on numerosity as a separate, essential process in the assessments of young children.s mathematical skills. Second, the substantial individual differences in SFON tendency during the childhood years suggest that uncovering and modeling this kind of mathematically meaningful perceiving of the surroundings and tasks could be an efficient tool for promoting young children.s mathematical development, and thus prevent later failures in learning mathematical skills. It is proposed to consider focusing on numerosity as one potential sub-process of activities involving exact number recognition in future studies.

Financial performance of segments in the intelligent home network

The goal of this study is to examine the intelligent home business network in order to determine which part of the network has the best financial abilities to produce new business models and products/services by using financial statement analysis. A group of 377 studied limited companies is divided into four examined segments based on their offering in producing intelligent homes. The segments are customer service providers, system integrators, subsystem suppliers and component suppliers. Eight different key figures are calculated from each of the companies to get a comprehensive view of their financial performances, after which each of the segments is studied statistically to determine the performances of the whole segments. The actual performance differences between the segments are calculated by using the multi-criteria decision analysis method in which the performances of the key figures are graded and each key figure is weighted according to its importance for the goal of the study. The results of this analysis showed that subsystem suppliers have the best financial performance. Second best are system integrators, third are customer service providers and fourth component suppliers. None of the segments were strikingly poor, but even component suppliers were rather reasonable in their performance; so, it can be said that no part of the intelligent home business network has remarkably inadequate financial abilities to develop new business models and products/services.

Measuring Cost of Poor Quality in Industrial Electronics

Quality is not only free but it can be a profit maker. Every dollar that is not spent on doing things wrong becomes a dollar right on the bottom line. The main objective of this thesis is to give an answer on how cost of poor quality can be measured theoretically correctly. Different calculation methods for cost of poor quality are presented and discussed in order to give comprehensive picture about measurement process. The second objective is to utilize the knowledge from the literature review and to apply it when creating a method for measuring cost of poor quality in supplier performance rating. Literature review indicates that P-A-F model together with ABC methodology provides a mean for quality cost calculations. These models give an answer what should be measured and how this measurement should be carried out. However, when product or service quality costs are incurred when quality character derivates from target value, then QLF seems to be most appropriate methodology for quality cost calculation. These methodologies were applied when creating a quality cost calculation method for supplier performance ratings.

Model-based testing of software systems : functionality and performance

Software is a key component in many of our devices and products that we use every day. Most customers demand not only that their devices should function as expected but also that the software should be of high quality, reliable, fault tolerant, efficient, etc. In short, it is not enough that a calculator gives the correct result of a calculation, we want the result instantly, in the right form, with minimal use of battery, etc. One of the key aspects for succeeding in today's industry is delivering high quality. In most software development projects, high-quality software is achieved by rigorous testing and good quality assurance practices. However, today, customers are asking for these high quality software products at an ever-increasing pace. This leaves the companies with less time for development. Software testing is an expensive activity, because it requires much manual work. Testing, debugging, and verification are estimated to consume 50 to 75 per cent of the total development cost of complex software projects. Further, the most expensive software defects are those which have to be fixed after the product is released. One of the main challenges in software development is reducing the associated cost and time of software testing without sacrificing the quality of the developed software. It is often not enough to only demonstrate that a piece of software is functioning correctly. Usually, many other aspects of the software, such as performance, security, scalability, usability, etc., need also to be verified. Testing these aspects of the software is traditionally referred to as nonfunctional testing. One of the major challenges with non-functional testing is that it is usually carried out at the end of the software development process when most of the functionality is implemented. This is due to the fact that non-functional aspects, such as performance or security, apply to the software as a whole. In this thesis, we study the use of model-based testing. We present approaches to automatically generate tests from behavioral models for solving some of these challenges. We show that model-based testing is not only applicable to functional testing but also to non-functional testing. In its simplest form, performance testing is performed by executing multiple test sequences at once while observing the software in terms of responsiveness and stability, rather than the output. The main contribution of the thesis is a coherent model-based testing approach for testing functional and performance related issues in software systems. We show how we go from system models, expressed in the Unified Modeling Language, to test cases and back to models again. The system requirements are traced throughout the entire testing process. Requirements traceability facilitates finding faults in the design and implementation of the software. In the research field of model-based testing, many new proposed approaches suffer from poor or the lack of tool support. Therefore, the second contribution of this thesis is proper tool support for the proposed approach that is integrated with leading industry tools. We o er independent tools, tools that are integrated with other industry leading tools, and complete tool-chains when necessary. Many model-based testing approaches proposed by the research community suffer from poor empirical validation in an industrial context. In order to demonstrate the applicability of our proposed approach, we apply our research to several systems, including industrial ones.