BDA 398CTopics: Business Modeling with Excel

This course provides an introduction to the development of managerial decision models that are used to analyze business problems and to make optimal managerial decisions. It provides students with hands-on learning in using Excel as a platform to build these models and to determine the optimal decisions. The course consists of three parts. In the first part, students will learn the basics of describing business problems using mathematical models and they will explore the power of Excel in solving simple problems. In the second part, students will learn how to build various types of optimization models in Excel. While the optimization models covered in this course entail deterministic problems (all required data is known), students will learn how to use simulation models to tackle uncertainty in data. The third part introduces the students to the use of Monte Carlo simulation in their models. In the second and third modules, students will implement the learned modeling techniques in applications from all business disciplines and real-life problems.