What you will study
This module will enable you to develop the independent research and online collaborative skills necessary to critically explore and understand your own organisation's infrastructure, and to provide the tools and practices for analysing information, so that decisions and performance can be enhanced. You'll explore the theoretical and practical connections between three distinct yet closely-interrelated fields of study: Financial Management. Operations Management and Business Intelligence.
The concept of understanding, creating, improving and sustaining value is central to the module and runs through all five units that comprise the module. Throughout the module a series of blogging activities (visible only to members of your tutor group, provide an opportunity to reflect on the application of module frameworks to your own context and learn about the practices of value creation in other students’ contexts.
Unit 1 An introduction to value, you'll be introduced to and work through the core themes of the module: creating and sustaining value, operations management, financial management and business intelligence. You'll learn about and discuss the concepts of value and value creation and be asked to reflect on how businesses create and sustain value and sometimes destroy value. This unit provides a foundation for the rest of the module.
Unit 2 Creating financial value examine
s the ways in which finance and accounting activities help measure, forecast, analyse and control the value generation activities of an organisation. It covers three broad topics: budgets, forecasting, and costing; financial statements - what they are and what they tell us; and analysing an organisation’s performance.
Unit 3 Managing operations explores how businesses can create and sustain value by appropriately formulating and implementing an operations strategy as well as monitoring and controlling its execution. As part of this unit you'll also look at business intelligence and the ways it can support value creation through the collection, storage and transformation of data into meaningful information that supports the organisation’s value creating activities.
Unit 4 Putting theory into practice - the Newspaper Game is organised around a simulation of the operations of a small newspaper vending firm, and their suppliers, to explore different trade-offs in value creation. You’ll use the simulation to learn about these trade-offs and how value creation can be optimised for the organisation, and across supply chains.
Unit 5 Trends and challenges in value creation provides the opportunity to explore trends and challenges in value creation. You'll choose a trend and research how it may affect your own sector. You'll write a blog about this work for your tutor group and draw on other students’ blogs to enhance your own understanding of important trends and their potential impact on value creation in your sector.