The Back to Business short courses expose participants to the following topics:

Module 1: The Global Competitive Advantage in the 21st Century
Rajan Kamath, Instructor 

Global competitive advantage in the 21st Century
The Competitive Advantage of Nations
Building and Maintaining a Culture of Productivity
Case: Virginia Mason Hospital
The Strategic Implications of Lean
Change Management
Managing Alignment
Problem Definition
Language Processing
Affinity Diagrams
The 5 Evils of the Workplace
Scientific Problem Solving
PDCA and Teamwork
Case: Stanford Hospital

Module 2: Spreadsheet Engineering
Jeff Camm, Instructor

Spreadsheet Engineering
Building world-class spreadsheets for business decision making
Principles of building Good Spreadsheet Models
Powerful Mathematical and Financial Functions in Excel
Auditing an Existing Excel Model
Applications: Retirement Planning Model; Lease versus Buy; etc..

Analyzing Data and Forecasting
Data Management
Descriptive Statistics
Simple Approaches to Forecasting
Applications: Sales Forecasting; stock variance and covariance; predictive modeling
From What If to What's Best - - building optimization models using Excel Solver
Linear Models
Nonlinear Models
Discrete Models
Applications: product mix; logistics; portfolio selection; scheduling; etc.

Module 3: Data Modeling for Business Applications
Uma Umanath, Instructor, Vivek Choudhury, Instructor

Data Modeling using Visio
Development of conceptual data model using the Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling grammar [Tool used: MS/Visio].

Database design: Relational Modeling grammar
Development of logical data model using the Relational modeling grammar
Relational schema and normalization

Enterprise resource planning using SAP/R3 (Choudhury)
Why ERP?
Hands on exercise in SAP/R3

Relational schema and normalization (Umanath)
Database Development
Relational Algebra and SQL (Structured Query Language)
[Tool Used: Oracle 11g]

Module 4: Managing Projects
Amit Raturi, Instructor

Defining and managing projects: MS Project
Project definition
Project schedules and plans
Delivering value through improvement projects
Applications: Microsoft project lab

Resource management & earned value analysis
Resource management – time and resource constrained schedules
Slack and its uses
Budgeting
Earned value analysis

Module 5: Human Intrepretations & Marketing
Bob Dwyer, Instructor  Suzanne Masterson, Instructor  Elaine Hollensbe, Instructor 

Finding the sweet spot & frontiers of marketing
Customers Count
Customer Value
Creating Value
Crafting the Marketing Program
Honing the Program
Market Breakdowns

Human interpretations
Exploring career development issues
Writing value propositions
Understanding and building a network
Developing strategies for job search, resumes and interviews
Gaining experience with mock interviews

Module 6: Discovering Financial Statements
Terry Campbell, Instructor

Module 7: Continuous improvement
Dilesh Patel and Neil Shah, Instructors

Continuous improvement
Process thinking – what is it?
Process knowledge – characterizing the levels
Process mapping and reference models: tasks, connections, pathways
Process control – the middle step
Quincunx experiments and results
Process knowledge and learning
Defining improvement projects: metrics and the balanced scorecard

Module 8: Business Plans & Social Entrepreneurship
Charles Mattews, Instructor Raj Mehta, Instructor

Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship and Innovation
A Customer and Strategic Focus
The Entrepreneurial Process: A Product/Service Approach
Defining the Value Proposition
From Industry Analysis to Feasibility
The Business Plan: Building a Strategic Check sheet
Planning for Action
Ideation and Conceptualization
Formulization and Implementation
Corporate Venturing: The Art & Science of Intrapreneurship

For profit social enterprise
Life beyond the typical “corporate America”
The triple bottom line

• Models for funding
• Making it work: examples include Lapdesk from South Africa, medical tourism in Thailand