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Improving medical and economic efficiency is an urgent task for top management of medical organizations. It is determined by the necessity to implement modern medical concepts of value and personalized medicine. The current development of digital technologies (IoT, Big Data, neurotechnology, block chain) allows the implementation of such medical concepts. In this regard, new business models of medical organizations appear; the structure of valuable offers of medical services, distribution channels and the system of working with medical services consumers are changing. Understanding the development strategy of medical organizations requires monitoring activities. It is possible when forming a system of indicators of the medical organization, which will allow to evaluate the work results. In addition, tools visualizing these indicators are required to make management decisions based on the analysis. Thus, the significance of this chosen research topic is confirmed. The thesis presents the analysis of modern medical organization business processes for the implementation of an innovative business model that implements the value-based and personalized medicine principles. The system of efficiency indicators of the medical organization has been formed. An overview of the tools for KPI system visualizing the scorecard and the subsequent assessment of the organization are presented. The requirements for BI-applications for visualizing the efficiency indicators of a medical organization have been shaped. A prototype of BI application has been developed that allows to visualize indicators and analyze activity based on the results.

This qualitative explorative study was conducted to investigate how businesses can optimize working with influencer. The topic of influencer marketing has been receiving increasing academic attention, however studies have not yet covered various aspects of it. Thus, the purpose of the thesis was to explore how brands can better identify influencers for their influencer marketing campaigns on social media, investigate managerial practices of influencer marketing brands from different industries can apply and identify ways of measuring the success of the influencer marketing campaigns. The study identified the main issues and challenges of influencer marketing and through literature study and qualitative semi-structured interviews with the influencer marketing practitioners discovered ways how to tackle these challenges. The main theoretical and practical application of the thesis is that influencer marketing practitioners should not pay attention only to numerical and tangible things. More focus should be placed on the fit between influencer and the brand as well as on building long-term relationship. The empirical study also advances the understanding of the role of a manager in influencer marketing collaborations. As the result of the study the practical framework with the steps to follow in order to execute influencer marketing campaign on social media was created.

Solvent extraction of calcium and magnesium impurities from a lithium-rich brine (Ca ~ 2,000 ppm, Mg ~ 50 ppm, Li ~ 30,000 ppm) was investigated using a continuous counter-current solvent extraction mixer-settler set-up. The literature review includes a general review about resources, demands and production methods of Li followed by basics of solvent extraction. Experimental section includes batch experiments for investigation of pH isotherms of three extractants; D2EHPA, Versatic 10 and LIX 984 with concentrations of 0.52, 0.53 and 0.50 M in kerosene respectively. Based on pH isotherms LIX 984 showed no affinity for solvent extraction of Mg and Ca at pH ≤ 8 while D2EHPA and Versatic 10 were effective in extraction of Ca and Mg. Based on constructed pH isotherms, loading isotherms of D2EHPA (at pH 3.5 and 3.9) and Versatic 10 (at pH 7 and 8) were further investigated. Furthermore based on McCabe-Thiele method, two extraction stages and one stripping stage (using HCl acid with concentration of 2 M for Versatic 10 and 3 M for D2EHPA) was practiced in continuous runs. Merits of Versatic 10 in comparison to D2EHPA are higher selectivity for Ca and Mg, faster phase disengagement, no detrimental change in viscosity due to shear amount of metal extraction and lower acidity in stripping. On the other hand D2EHPA has less aqueous solubility and is capable of removing Mg and Ca simultaneously even at higher Ca loading (A/O in continuous runs > 1). In general, shorter residence time (~ 2 min), lower temperature (~23 °C), lower pH values (6.5-7.0 for Versatic 10 and 3.5-3.7 for D2EHPA) and a moderately low A/O value (< 1:1) would cause removal of 100% of Ca and nearly 100% of Mg while keeping Li loss less than 4%, much lower than the conventional precipitation in which 20% of Li is lost.

Companies always strive for an increase in profit by optimizing their production system. This has become possible with the application and use of certain tools and methodologies. This study analyses the actual production system for one product. Production parameters such as throughput, cycle time, inventories in the production process, and idle time were investigated. This research paper is based on achieving two different goals. The first goal is to reduce production costs while maintaining the same production capacity. The second goal is to increase production capacity. The Lean Manufacturing methodology enabled the elimination of identified waste in the production system. The elimination of waste directly affects the reduction of production costs. A more suitable layout of the production line was created, which reduces unnecessary movements. By Load Balancing, a reduction in the number of operators was achieved. One of the key elements of Lean Manufacturing, in addition to continuous improvement, is the respect of employees as key figures in product development. Therefore, the analysis also went in the direction of making production easier for employees. The Theory of Constraints (TOC) methodology was applied to investigate and analyse possible measures to reduce the observed bottleneck of the system or completely remove that bottleneck in order to increase production capacity. TOC steps are: identification of the constraint, constraint exploitation, subordination and synchronization of the constraint, the elevation of the performance, and repetition of the process with the aim of continuous improvement. In order to increase production capacity and reduce inventory between operations, the implementation of One-piece flow was analysed. With the Lean Manufacturing tools and Theory of Constraints methodology, the steps to achieve optimization were described and three solutions were offered for the Case Study. The first solution resulted in a cost reduction of €60,000 per year for the same production capacity. The other two solutions offered increases in production capacity by 21.62% and 46.15%.

Nanotiltration is a membrane separation method known for its special characteristic of rejecting multivalent ions and passing monovalent ions. Thus, it is commonly applied with dilute aqueous solutions in partial salt removal, like in drinking water production. The possibilities of nanofiltration have been studied and the technique applied in a wide branch of industries, e.g. the pulp and paper, the textile and the chemical processing industry. However, most present applications and most of the potential applications studied involve dilute solutions, the permeating stream being generally water containing monovalent salts. In this study nanotiltration is investigated more as a fractionation method. A well-known application in the dairy industry is concentration and partial salt removal from whey. Concentration and partial demineralization is beneficial for futher processing of whey as whey concentrates are used e.g. in baby foods. In the experiments of this study nanotiltration effectively reduced the monovalent salts in the whey concentrate. The main concern in this application is lactose leakage into the permeate. With the nanofiltration membranes used the lactose retentions were practically ? 99%. Another dairy application studied was the purification and reuse of cleaning solutions. This is an environmentally driven application. An 80% COD reduction by nanofiltration was observed for alkaline cleaning-in-place solution. Nanofiltration is not as commonly applied in the sugar and sweeteners industry as in the dairy industry. In this study one potential application was investigated, namely xylose purification from hemicellulose hydrolyzate. Xylose is raw material for xylitol production. Xylose separation from glucose was initially studied with xylose-glucose model solutions. The ability of nanofiltration to partially separate xylose into the permeate from rather concentrated xylose-glucose solutions (10 w-% and 30 w-%) became evident. The difference in size between xylose and glucose molecules according to any size measure is small, e.g. the Stokes diameter of glucose is 0.73 nm compared to 0.65 nm for xylose. In further experiments, xylose was purified into nanoliltration permeate from a hemicellulose hydrolyzate solution. The xylose content in the total solids was increased by 1.4—1.7 fold depending on temperature, pressure and feed composition.

A new area of machine learning research called deep learning, has moved machine learning closer to one of its original goals: artificial intelligence and general learning algorithm. The key idea is to pretrain models in completely unsupervised way and finally they can be fine-tuned for the task at hand using supervised learning. In this thesis, a general introduction to deep learning models and algorithms are given and these methods are applied to facial keypoints detection. The task is to predict the positions of 15 keypoints on grayscale face images. Each predicted keypoint is specified by an (x,y) real-valued pair in the space of pixel indices. In experiments, we pretrained deep belief networks (DBN) and finally performed a discriminative fine-tuning. We varied the depth and size of an architecture. We tested both deterministic and sampled hidden activations and the effect of additional unlabeled data on pretraining. The experimental results show that our model provides better results than publicly available benchmarks for the dataset. Syväoppiminen (deep learning) on uusi koneoppimisen tutkimussuuntaus, joka on tuonut koneoppimista lähemmäs sen alkuperäisiä tavoitteita: tekoälyä ja yleistä oppimisalgoritmia. Syväoppimisen keskeisenä ajatuksena on, että mallit aluksi koulutetaan ohjaamattomasti ja tämän jälkeen ne voidaan hienosäätää ohjatusti tiettyä tehtävää varten. Tässä työssä esitellään syväoppimismalleja ja algoritmeja ja näitä menetelmiä sovelletaan kasvonpiirteiden tunnistamiseen. Tehtävänä on tunnistaa 15 kasvojen avainpistettä mustavalkokuvista. Jokainen avainpiste on määritetty (x,y) reaaliarvoparilla kuvan pikseliavaruudessa. Kokeissa esiopetettiin deep belief verkkoja (DBN), joille lopuksi tehtiin erotteleva hienosäätö. Arkkitehtuurin syvyyttä ja kokoa vaihdeltiin. Esiopetuksessa tutkittiin deterministisiä ja otannalla saatujen piilokerrosten aktivointeja sekä merkitsemättömän lisädatan vaikutusta. Kokeellisten tulosten perusteella malli suoriutuu paremmin kuin datajoukolle julkisesti saatavilla olevat vertailukohdat.

The main objective of the present study was to analyze the best approach on how to coat paperboard trays at the pressing stage. The coating gives the paperboard enhanced barrier and mechanical properties. The whole process chain of the barrier coating development was studied in the research. The methodology applied includes obtaining the optimum temperature at which good adhesion and bonding is formed between paperboard and skin film. Evaluation of mechanical properties after the coatings; such as cracking, curling and barrier properties was performed.

Coal slurry was of vital interest during the last century due to its potential as an alternative fuel where liquid fuels were necessary. Recently, environmental impacts of the traditional fuels, similarities of bio-coal to that of coal, and huge bio-coal supply has attracted the attention to prepare bio-coal slurries as a new fuel. Rudolf Diesel who invented the diesel engine on 1895 was of the opinion that diesel engines are capable to use different kinds of fuels due to the special design. He tried some kind of vegetable oil to operate on his IC engine. Recently, due to high energy density and more environmentally friendly fuel, researchers believe that bio-coal slurries could act as a new alternative fuel in large diesel engines. Loads of research on different kinds of bio-coal slurry were done by the other researchers worldwide and a lot of progress to boost slurry’s quality were achieved recently. The present study aims to achieve the ideal condition of different factors affecting on the quality of bio-coal slurry. One charcoal sample and two kinds of torrefied wood were used to investigate and compare the reaction of various factors. The results show a great gap between the quality of slurries made of different samples and more researches are necessary to fully understand the impact of the different parameter and improving the quality.

Tutkielman tarkoituksena oli selvittää, kuinka käyttöpääomasykliä voitaisiin nopeuttaa käyttämällä toimittajarahoitusta, kuinka suuri toimittajarahoituksen potentiaalinen vaikutus on ja vaikuttavatko yrityksen ominaisuudet potentiaalin määrään. Vaikutusta tutkittiin käyttämällä Suomen Meriteollisuuden organisaation jäsenyritysten viimeisimpiä tilinpäätöstietoja. Käytettävä aineisto on kerätty Amadeus-tietokannasta, ja organisaation 79:n jäsenyrityksen data ryhmiteltiin eri tavoin sen laskentaa ja tarkastelua varten. Toimittajarahoituksen vaikutuksen voimakkuutta myyntisaamisien nopeutumisena verrattiin yrityksien varastotasojen laskemiseen, joka johtaa varastojen kiertoajan nopeutumiseen. Tällöin vertailemalla kiertoaikojen nopeutumisen vaikutusta käyttöpääomasykliin saadaan kuva sen potentiaalisen vaikutuksen määrästä. Tutkielman laskelmien mukaan toimittajarahoituksella voidaan merkittävästi nopeuttaa käyttöpääomasykliä, joka vapauttaa prosessiin sitoutuneita resursseja. Yrityksien ominaisuuksilla kuten koolla, yritystyypillä ja sijainnilla toimitusverkostossa oli yhteys potentiaalisen käyttöpääomasyklin nopeutumisen määrään. Tämä selittyy erilaisilla käyttöpääomasyklin osien painotuksilla. Toimittajarahoitus kun ei vaikuta suoraan yrityksen varastotasoihin, joten sen tuoma prosentuaalinen hyöty on suurempi yrityksillä, joilla on pienemmät varastot. Laskelmat jäsenyritysten mediaanilukujen perusteella osoittavat, että käyttöpääomasykli voisi nopeutua toimittajarahoituksen avulla 75%, mikä tarkoittaa syklin lyhenemistä 47:llä päivällä. Tulosten mukaan useimmissa tapauksissa myyntisaamisien kiertoajan lyhentäminen toimittajarahoituksen avulla varastojen pienentämisen sijaan nopeuttaa käyttöpääomasykliä enemmän. Käyttöpääomasyklin nopeutumisen lisäksi toimittajarahoitus mahdollistaa yritysten pääsyn kustannustehokkaaseen rahoitukseen ja siten pääomakustannusten pienentämiseen. The research was made to find out how cash conversion cycle speed could be increased by using supply chain financing, how much the potential of supply chain financing is, and do company characteristics play a role on it. The impact was measured by using the latest financial statements data from members of Finnish Marine Industries organization. The data was collected from Amadeus-database, and 79 member companies were grouped in different ways for calculations and evaluations. Influence of supply chain finance was defined by increased speed of sales receivables, and it was compared to decreased inventories that cause decrease in days inventory outstanding. Thus by comparing days sales outstanding to days inventory outstanding, it can be concluded how much those will potentially increase cash conversion cycle speed. According the calculations made in this thesis, supply chain financing can significantly increase cash conversion cycle speed that in turn releases resources that are tied to the process. Companies’ characteristics like size, type, and position in supply network, had a connection to the amount of which cash conversion cycle speed increased. That can be explained by different structures of the parts that form cash conversion cycle. Supply chain financing does not directly affect on company’s inventory levels, therefore percentu-al benefit it brings is greater with companies that have low inventories. Member compa-nies’ median values indicated that with the use of supply chain financing, the cash conversion cycle speeds can increase 75% resulting the cycle to shorten by 47 days. The results indicated that in most cases shortening sales receivables cycle was more effective than lowering inventory levels to increase cash conversion cycle. In addition to increased cash conversion cycle, the use of supply chain financing gives companies an access to cost effective financing and thus lower their cost of capital.

The target if this study was to form a proposal of the performance measurement system (PMS) and its implementation process for a logistics service provider (LSP). Thus, suitable PMS frameworks, implementation processes and key performance indicators for an LSP are studied in this paper. The study was conducted with a case study methodology and in the case study one LSP’s national management team and approximately 80 employees of the LSP were interviewed. Based to the interviews a proposal of the PMS framework, KPIs and the implementation process was formed. As a result, the case study proposes the LSP to use Flexible Performance Measurement System framework (FPMS). PMS’ core measures are financial KPIs and supportive measures cover internal process, personnel, sales and customer perspective KPIs. For the PMS implementation following steps are proposed: Defining the main purpose of the PMS, defining the critical success factors. defining the KPIs, testing the PMS with real data, adapting the PMS in the management practices and defining a maintenance and development methods for the PMS.