MBA and M.E. in Engineering Management Dual Degree Master’s Program

This course introduces managers to the essence of business economics – the theories, concepts and ideas that form the economist’s tool kit encompassing both the microeconomic and macroeconomic environments. Microeconomic topics include demand and supply, elasticity, consumer choice, production, cost, profit maximization, market structure, and game theory while the Macroeconomic topics will be GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand, aggregate supply, fiscal and monetary policies. In addition the basic concepts in international trade and finance will be discussed.

This course will provide the student with the principles and techniques of financial and managerial accounting for technical organizations. The emphasis will be on the use of financial data for decision making. The basics of accounting will briefly be covered, with the major amount of time spent on ways to understand, analyze and use the data for decision making. Budgeting and analysis of performance, as well as, recognizing fixed and variable expenses are other key areas of financial management. Issues of valuation, time value of money, uncertainty and risk will be integrated in the material. The one-term course will make extensive use of the text by Weygandt et al (see below), supplemented by cases, exercises, homework and examinations. Emphasis will be on real-world, practical application of the tools of finance to management decision making.

This course covers the fundamental principles of finance. The primary concepts covered include the time value of money, principles of valuation and risk. Specific applications include the valuation of debt and equity securities as well as capital budgeting analysis, financial manager’s functions, liquidity vs. profitability, financial planning, capital budgeting, management of long term funds, money and capital markets, debt and equity, management of assets, cash and accounts receivable, inventory and fixed assets. Additional topics include derivative markets.

Applied Analytics is a capstone course for the analytic-focused MBA program. It is intended to integrate all previously taken coursed in the program by presenting a set of increasingly complex business problems. These problems can be solved through analytic skill taught in this and previous courses. In particular, the course is intended to reinforce the understanding of analysis as way to build models that can focus attention on parts of the system that can be improved through intervention. The early part of the course uses synthetic data and empirical data readily available for analysis. The second part of the course encourages students to state and solve their own problem, gathering their own data as a part of the analytic process.

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

Executives make decisions every day in the face of uncertainty. The objective of this course is to help students understand how decisions are made, why they are often less than optimal, and how decision-making can be improved. This course will contrast how managers do make decisions with how they should make decisions, by thinking about how “rational” decision makers should act, by conducting in-class exercises and examining empirical evidence of how individuals do act (often erroneously) in managerial situations. The course will include statistical tools for decision-making, as well as treatment of the psychological factors involved in making decisions.

The study of marketing principles from the conceptual, analytical, and managerial points of view. Topics include: strategic planning, market segmentation, product life-cycle, new product development, advertising and selling, pricing, distribution, governmental, and other environmental influences as these factors relate to markets and the business structure.

Covers the general area of management of operations, both manufacturing and non-manufacturing. The focus of the course is on productivity and total quality management. Topics include quality control and quality management, systems of inventory control, work and materials scheduling, and process management.

Project success depends, largely, on the human side. Success in motivating project workers, organizing and leading project teams, communication and sharing information, and conflict resolution, are just a few areas that are critical for project success. However, being primarily technical people, many project managers tend to neglect these "soft" issues, assuming they are less important or that they should be addressed by direct functional managers. The purpose of this course is to increase awareness of project managers to the critical issues of managing people and to present some of the theories and practices of leading project workers and teams.

An interdisciplinary course which examines the elements of, and the framework for, developing and implementing organizational strategy and policy in competitive environments. The course analyzes management problems both from a technical-economic perspective and from a behavioral perspective. Topics treated include: assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; sources of competitive advantage; organizational structure and strategic planning; and leadership, organizational development, and total quality management. The case method of instruction is used extensively in this course.

Field Consulting Project Capstone Course

This course brings a strong modeling orientation to bear on the process of obtaining and utilizing resources to produce and deliver useful goods and services so as to meet the goals of the organization. Decision-oriented models such as linear programming, inventory control, and forecasting are discussed and then implemented utilizing spreadsheets and other commercial software. A review of the fundamentals of statistical analysis oriented toward business problems will also be conducted.

This course enables the Engineering Management student to acquire the knowledge and skills he/she will need to handle the variety and volume of information encountered in today’s workplace. The course uses Python, which is rapidly becoming the language of choice for information handling and data analysis. Students will work with both structured and semi-structured data.

This course is a study of analytic techniques for rational decision-making that addresses uncertainty, conflicting objectives, and risk attitudes. This course covers modeling uncertainty; rational decision-making principles; representing decision problems with value trees, decision trees and influence diagrams; solving value hierarchies; defining and calculating the value of information; incorporating risk attitudes into the analysis; and conducting sensitivity analyses.

This project-based course exposes students to tools and methodologies useful for forming and managing an effective engineering design team in a business environment. Topics covered will include: personality profiles for creating teams with balanced diversity; computational tools for project coordination and management; real time electronic documentation as a critical design process variable; and methods for refining project requirements to ensure that the team addresses the right problem with the right solution.

This course addresses the design of the peopled-system that is responsible for designing and testing a product or operational system. There are three keys to designing the development system that are emphasized as part of this course: the fact that the design process should be a discovery process, the critical feedback and control activities that must be implemented for cost-discovery process, the critical feedback and control activities that must be implemented for cost-effective success, and the design of risk management(with an emphasis on adaptive testing) activities. This course will focus on the functional processes that must be performed by the development system, but will also address physical resources(people and software) and associated organizational structures.

This course emphasizes the development of modeling and simulation concepts and analysis skills necessary to design, program, implement, and use computers to solve complex systems/products analysis problems. The key emphasis is on problem formulation, model building, data analysis, solution techniques, and evaluation of alternative designs/ processes in complex systems/products. Overview of modeling techniques and methods used in decision analysis, including Monte Carlo and discrete event simulation is presented.

The course introduces students to fundamentals of system dynamics modeling of complex systems and enterprises. System Dynamics is a modeling approach that has been developed at MIT in the 1960s. System dynamics is used for variety of applications ranging from supply chain management, decision analysis, innovation diffusion and management and other management as well as engineering applications of complex systems. This course we will cover the basic fundamentals of systems dynamics and enable students to learn and build system dynamic models including causal links and loop diagrams, stock and flows with application to modeling contagion in systems, innovation diffusion, delays in complex systems and many more examples and applications.