Operations Management is an outgrowth of Production Management, a relatively new field in the history of business enterprise. With the onset and maturing of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing capacities expanded exponentially as did the amount of support and scientific tools needed to sustain this capability. Companies, and even entire industries, often migrated regionally, and ultimately internationally, to obtain a greater economic advantage in the utilization of their resources. Concurrent to the rise of manufacturing industries, service industries also were created and grew to assist consumers in choice selection. As it stands today, Operations Management encompasses the physical reality of both manufacturing and service industries in their quest for increasing effectiveness and efficiencies in delivering the goods and services to their intermediate and ultimate consumers.

In this course, the adult student will expand previous knowledge of communication through exposure to effective verbal and nonverbal communication tactics to develop a framework for strategic managerial communications.  The student is challenged to acquire and utilize the skills, attitudes, and knowledge of social contexts and the workplace.  

Good business decisions are made with the assistance of vast amounts of information. Statistics is a methodical way of dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, inference and presentation of that data.

The first step in quantitative analysis is to identify a problem that can be solved using statistics. Next is to recognize the various types of information already available or the kind of information needed to solve business problem, or challenge assumptions. Once collected, data is organized and statistical measures applied showing mean, median, range, and standard deviation to help analyze the information.