This session will introduce you to the structure of the module. We shall see that competition means that goods and services are compared to one another continually. For firms this means two things. First, that their performance is being continually evaluated in terms of profitability, price and quality. And secondly, that they are continuously confronted with the need to change. We shall explore how the proper management of these two realities can be transformed into a powerful competitive advantage.

In order to be profitable a company needs to develop and adapt viable strategies. I must - above all – also act in alignment to the strategy. This means that all stakeholders must be made aware of it and act according to plan. This is the major challenge of executive management. In this session we shall introduce some basic – but fundamental - strategy and stakeholder management concepts and tools.

First we'll have a look at the most fundamental of financial statements, the balance sheet. We shall see that every person can make up its own personal balance sheet, exactly in the same manner than it can be done for a corporation.

In this session we shall actually be creating a fictitious corporate balance sheet from a list of financial transactions and we shall make exercises.

This exercise covers lessons 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3 of the module and aims at assessing your understanding of the business environment and stakeholder management.

Creating the Vertico Ltd. initial balance sheet statement

We shall now look the two other essential financial statements, the profit and loss, and the cash flow statements. Using the fictitious corporate balance sheets used in previous exercises we shall deduct their P&L and CF statements.

Creating Vertico Ltd's P&L and cashflow statements

This exercise covers lessons 2 to 7 of the module. The student will be asked to populate balance sheet, P&L and cash flow statements based on general ledger data input.

We shall now see that by re-arranging the balance sheet we can get a better financial understanding of a company's operations and funding.

During this session we will analyse high level financial indicators, such as, return on capital employed, expense and capital ratios, and see why they are so important for both management and investors. We shall point out the fundamental flaw of financial statements as management tools: they reflect past performance and say little about the future. We shall see how trend analysis and benchmarking can help us interpret ratios in a more meaningful manner.

This exercise covers lessons 8 to 10 of the module. It will assess your ability to define and calculate some of the most commonly used accounting ratios using basic financial statements and a re-arranged balance sheet.

In today's business environment value is usually created through the execution of processes. The precision of the execution of these processes determines to a high extend the quality of the products, indifferently whether these are facts or services. The customer perspective is essential in value perception and that is why we shall start our exploration of business process management from that point of view.

The first thing to understand in an activity is its current state from initial supplies to the product delivered to the customer. This activity does not come all at once. Value is added step-by-step, and in this session we shall examine how this can be represented in a manner useful to the possible improvement on the value producing activity.

This exercise covers lessons 11 to 13 of the module. It will assess your ability to analyse a customer experience chart and to deduct a SIPOC chart and a list of implied activities from it.

In this session we move from the customer perspective to the corporate point of view. The question here is: do we really understand the value the company is creating and could we design better ways to improve our performance?

Once the process flow has been documented financial, quantitative and qualitative metrics can be applied to it. In this session we shall focus on financial metrics and show how process cost information can be fed back into the corporate P&L statement and budget.

Corporate performance should be aligned with the strategy. This is not always obvious and mangers sometimes face complex problems of prioritisation. In this and the following sessions we shall show how activity indicators provide efficient means to achieve alignment.

In any company, however small, a myriad of factors can be measured. In this session we look at how to identify the essential indicators and measurement of which are really important for the realisation of the company's operational and ultimately strategic objectives.

Sometimes the formal project approach to change is too bulky a procedure. In this session we shall study what methods companies have developed to integrate continuous improvement of goods and services at the very heart of their daily operations and corporate culture. We shall also see how these approaches presuppose continuous performance measurement and the redaction of business cases. Innovation is a change different in nature than an improvement. It supposes a more radical disruption of the strategy and operations of a company. It can be induced by external (scientific discovery, regulatory, …) or internal (research and development) factors. Technology always has been the driving force of industry and, recently, big data have become a source of innovation, mainly in the services sector.

This exercise covers lessons 19 to 21 of the module. It will assess your ability to prioritise a set of CSFs and KRIs from a list in function of a corporate strategy statement.

The final test of the module is a practical assignment consisting in the application of the business management techniques covered during the semester to the analysis of the annual report of a selected public company.