About this course

How do airlines decide when to increase ticket prices? Should a hotel charge less per night for a long stay than a short one? Why do some software companies bundle very different products together? How should a fashion retailer decide when do start discounting clothes? Why do so many discounted rates end in “.99”? How should a company balance the risk of holding too much inventory on hand and the risk of turning away customers? Does it ever make sense for retailers to lie to suppliers about how much they will need to order? Should retailers with multiple locations hold most of their inventory in a central warehouse or at the individual locations?

These are only a small sample of the operational and pricing challenges all businesses regularly face. These challenges are often addressed individually and in isolation but, in reality, all of these decisions interact with each other. This class looks at the demand and supply management challenges faced by companies in various industries and provides an introduction to the tools that can be used to address these challenges.

What you’ll learn

• To identify, evaluate, and capture business analytic opportunities that create business value
• Build models to support and help make managerial and business decisions
• Basic analytical methods and their applications
• Analyze case studies on organizations that successfully deployed analytical techniques

Prerequisites

Undergraduate probability, statistics, linear algebra and calculus.
Students should have familiarity with basic programming concepts in some procedural programming language.

Who can take this course?

Unfortunately, learners from one or more of the following countries or regions will not be able to register for this course: Iran, Cuba and the Crimea region of Ukraine. While edX has sought licenses from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to offer our courses to learners in these countries and regions, the licenses we have received are not broad enough to allow us to offer this course in all locations. EdX truly regrets that U.S. sanctions prevent us from offering all of our courses to everyone, no matter where they live.