Coursera - Value Chain Management Specialization by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Master Value Chain Analysis. Acquire critical business management competencies to create, measure, and maximize value.

Managerial Accounting: Cost Behaviors, Systems, and Analysis
In this course, you will learn how to use accounting to facilitate and align decisions made by owners, managers, and employees. You will learn how accountants create, organize, interpret, and communicate information that improves internal processes, and allows organizations to identify and leverage opportunities to create value within the supply chain and with customers.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand what managerial accounting is and why it is important. • Describe fundamental concepts of managerial accounting. • Apply the financial perspective of accounting for costs. • Identify problems associated with relying on financial accounting information for internal decision making. • Organize cost information according to the decision-making needs of the organization. • Apply activity-based costing (ABC) and recognize the influence of setting and decision characteristics on the relevance of ABC systems. • Address common "what-if" questions using cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis. • Apply CVP analysis in a variety of scenarios. This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price.

Managerial Accounting: Tools for Facilitating and Guiding Business Decisions
In this course, you will explore how to use accounting to allocate resources and incentivize manager and employee behaviors in using these resources. You will also learn how financial and non-financial accounting information facilitates strategic performance measurement and how to integrate this information to continuously improve strategy.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand the role of managerial accounting information in common business decisions • Differentiate relevant and irrelevant information • Avoid common pitfalls in business decisions • Prepare a master budget and its key components • Describe the iterative and interrelated nature of budgeting • Evaluate capital investments via a variety of measures • Understand how upper management uses variance analysis • Calculate, interpret, and investigate variances • Understand decentralization and its advantages and disadvantages • Compute and interpret financial performance measures • Communicate the role of non-financial measures and strategic performance measurement systems • Identify issues associated with performance measurement and incentives • Understand the nature and role of subjective performance evaluation.

Operations Management: Analysis and Improvement Methods
In this course, you will learn about the role of operations and how they are connected to other business functions in manufacturing- and service-focused organizations. You will learn and practice the use of decision-making frameworks and techniques applicable at all levels, from management-level strategic decisions such as connecting process to the needs of various customer segments, to front-line tactical decisions such as choosing between ordering larger quantities vs. ordering more frequently.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand the role of operations management • Relate underlying principles to operations management frameworks and techniques • Synthesize information to make strategic operations decisions • Evaluate processes on different dimensions • Apply analytical techniques for tactical operations decision.

Operations Management: Strategy and Quality Management for the Digital Age
In this course you will focus on process improvement. You will learn how to set organizational priorities for continuous process improvement, how to execute process improvement projects, and how to sustain the initiative for continuous improvements.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Understand the roles of process improvement • Relate underlying principles to frameworks and techniques used for process improvement • Synthesize information to make decisions for organizational initiatives and process improvement • Apply analytical techniques for tactical decisions in a process improvement project This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price.

Marketing Management I
In this course, you will learn how businesses create value for customers. We will examine the process by which Marketing builds on a thorough understanding of buyer behavior to create value. You will learn the major elements of the marketing mix - product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing - and see how they fit within different analytical frameworks that are useful to managers. This will enhance your understanding of how marketing works in the business world.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • Define marketing and describe how marketing creates value • Describe the elements of the marketing mix • Explain how these elements interact to create value for consumers • Use different analytical frameworks to examine how managers solve business problems • Evaluate brand extensions • Develop a marketing Plan proposal

Marketing Management II
In this course, you will further examine how businesses create value for customers. In Marketing Management I, you learned the major elements of the marketing mix - product policy, channels of distribution, communication, and pricing - and saw how they fit within different analytical frameworks that are useful to managers. In this course, you will complete a more detailed analysis of these elements in order to conduct a thorough strategic analysis of marketing opportunities and communicate marketing decisions. This will enable you to see “marketing in action” in the business world.

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to: • List all elements of the marketing mix • Explain the role each element plays in creating value • Compare different pricing models • Evaluate the use of different channels of distribution by existing businesses • Critique advertising execution • Create a persuasive advertising piece This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price.

Value Chain Management Capstone
The capstone for the Value Chain Management specialization will provide a learning experience that examines how the various segments of a business integrate to create a value chain. The capstone involves an in-depth analysis of an actual business situation. The final deliverable consists of a plan based on a comprehensive analysis of how accounting, marketing, and operations work together to create a value chain. The plan will propose how value creation in organizations and supply chains can be enhanced using the concepts and frameworks learned in the three courses.