Course Name: Foundations of Business Analytics
Course Code: BFMA101-1
Total number of hours: 45 Hours
Credits: 3
Course Description: This course provides the knowledge base for understanding the principles,
concepts, tools, and techniques of business analytics for effective decision-making by creating insights
from data. The objectives of the course are to equip learners with an understanding of data attributes,
data visualization, and deriving insights through both descriptive and predictive analytical
tools/frameworks. The course also investigates the functional applications of analytics.
Course Objectives:
 To understand the requirements for data preparation

To understand the various analytical tools available for decision making

To gain exposure to various visualization tools

To understand concepts and application of predictive modeling techniques

To identify applications for analytics in various domains/industries
Course Learning Outcomes: On having completed this course student should be able to:
 CLO1 - To be able to prepare data for analysis

CLO2 - To assess datasets and apply relevant analytical tools to derive insights

CLO3 - To visualize data in an effective manner that facilitates decision making.

CLO4 - To build predictive models using relevant analytical tools

CLO5 - To be able to develop models/solutions for business problems associated with specific
domains/industries.
Pedagogy: This course uses multiple pedagogies like interactive lecture, students’ discussions and PPTs,
case studies, quizzes, role plays, and other forms of experiential learning.
Syllabus
UNIT I INTRODUCTION TO ANALYTICS
8
Hours
Data – information – intelligence – knowledge approach: Meaning - Relevence and Differences.
Analytics: Importance - Types of analytics. Organization and source of data - Importance of data quality
- Popular tools used for analytics - Role of Data Scientist in Business & Society - Analytics Methodology.
UNIT II DATA PREPARATION (MS Excel)
Hours
8
Data types - data collection - Structured/unstructured data sources Government & private data
resources/repositories - Data scraping and data scrubbing - Removing duplicates, treating missing values
- Identification & treatment of outliers - Data cleaning – Identification of primary key & foreign key File
formats
for
various
analytical
tools.
UNIT III DATA ANALYTICS AND VISUALIZATION
(MS Excel)
12 Hours
Descriptive statistics, Measures of Central Tendency, Measures of Dispersion, Skewness, Kurtosis, Pivot
tables, and Cross tabulation.
Visualization tools, Tables, Charts, Advanced Data Visualization and Data Dashboards
UNIT IV PREDICTIVE MODELING AND APPLICATIONS OF
ANALYTICS
(MS Excel)
10 Hours
Simple linear regression model, assumptions, testing for normality, multicollinearity, Time Series
Pattern, forecast, accuracy, moving averages and seasonality
Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics, HR Analytics, Operation Analytics, tools and case studies.
UNIT V DECISION ANALYSIS (MS Excel)
7 Hours
Problem formulation - payoff tables, decision trees; Decision analysis without probabilities: optimistic
approach, conservative approach and mini-max regret approach; Decision analysis with probabilities:
expected value approach, risk analysis and sensitivity analysis; Decision analysis with sample
information - expected value of sample information and expected value of perfect information.
Core Text:
1. Camm, J. D., Cochran, J. J., Fry, M. J., Ohlmann, J. W., & Anderson, D. R. (2018). Essentials of
Business Analytics (Book Only). Nelson Education
2.James R. Evans, Business Analytics: Methods, Models & Decisions, 1st edi. Prentice Hall
Reference Books:
1. RN Prasad, Seema Acharya, Fundamentals of Business Analytics, 2nd edit. Wiley
2. U Dinesh Kumar, Business Analytics, 1st edi. Wiley
3. Amar Sahay, Business Analytics Volume II – A Data Driven Decision-Making Approach for
Business, BEP
Assessment details. CIA (100%)
Component
Description
Maximum
marks
Weightage
CIA1
CIA2
CIA3
Class
Participation
and
Attendance
Assignment 1
Assignment 2
Assignment 3
30
30
30
10
100%
100%
100%
100%
Total Marks
in Final
Grade
30
30
30
10
100