Advanced Business Analytics Specialization | University of Colorado

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About This Specialization

The Advanced Business Analytics Specialization brings together academic professionals and experienced practitioners to share real world data analytics skills you can use to grow your business, increase profits, and create maximum value for your shareholders. Learners gain practical skills in extracting and manipulating data using SQL code, executing statistical methods for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analysis, and effectively interpreting and presenting analytic results.

The problems faced by decision makers in today’s competitive business environment are complex. Achieve a clear competitive advantage by using data to explain the performance of a business, evaluate different courses of action, and employ a structured approach to business problem-solving.

Check out a one-minute video about this specialization to learn more!

5 Courses
Follow the suggested order or choose your own.

Projects
Designed to help you practice and apply the skills you learn.

Certificates
Highlight your new skills on your resume or LinkedIn.

Projects Overview

Throughout the specialization, you will apply the skills you learn to business problems and data sets. You will have opportunities to build conceptual models of business and simple database models, practice data extraction using SQL, apply predictive and prescriptive analytics to business problems, develop models for decision making, interpret the software output, and finally present results and share findings. We will use basic Excel and the software tool Analytic Solver Platform (ASP), which is a plug-in for Excel. Learners participating in assignments will be able to get free access to the software.

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Created by:

Instructors:

Manuel Laguna

Manuel Laguna is the Media One Professor of Management Science at the Leeds School of Business of the University of Colorado Boulder. He started his career at the University of Colorado in 1990, after receiving master’s (1987) and doctoral (1990) degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence and operations research to develop solution methods for practical problems in operations-management areas such as logistics and supply chains, telecommunications, decision-making under uncertainty and optimization of simulated systems.

Dr. Laguna has more than one hundred publications, including more than sixty articles in academic journals and four books. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Heuristics, is in the international advisory board of the Journal of the Operational Research Society and has been guest editor of the Annals of Operations Research and the European Journal of Operational Research.

Dr. Laguna has received research funding from private industry and government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research and the Environmental Protection Agency. He is member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science and was the general chair of the Institute’s national meeting in 2004. He is also a member of Beta Gamma Sigma and the International Honor Society Omega Rho.

Dr. Laguna is co-founder of OptTek Systems, a Boulder-based software and consulting company that provides optimization solutions. OptTek’s software is licensed to over 90,000 users, and its underlying methodology has been developed through a series of grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Institute of Health, as well as several other major sources of awards.

Dan Zhang

Dan Zhang is an associate professor in the Management and Entrepreneurship division at Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. Prior to Leeds, he was an assistant professor of operations management at Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Zhang received his PhD in industrial engineering from University of Minnesota and subsequently did postdoctoral work at Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. His current primary research interest is revenue management and pricing. In the last few years, he worked on approximate dynamic programming methods for large-scale dynamic optimization problems and on consumer behavior models with applications to revenue management and pricing. Dr. Zhang is a frequent reviewer for academic journals, conferences, and grant agencies. For his review work, he recently received meritorious service awards from Management Science and Manufacturing and Service Operations. Dr. Zhang currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, and is a Senior Editor for the journal Production and Operations Management. Dr. Zhang teaches in the area of operations management and data analytics. He consulted in the area of pricing and revenue management for companies in the US, Canada, Europe, and China.

David Torgerson

Dave is an Instructor and guest lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and specifically co-teaches the Master of Business Analytics program Boot Camp. He is passionate about the role data & analytics play in creating “clarity out of chaos” and how analytic capabilities can evolve into a strategic competitive advantages for companies and organizations. Dave started his career as a Nuclear Engineer in the U.S. Navy / Department of Energy. He spent a number of years as a management consultant specializing in strategy, analytics, and analytic organizational design, which led to series of industry-side roles in building analytic organizations and capabilities at U.S. Cellular, Gogo, and most recently Sentara Healthcare. Dave holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from Duke University, as well as a Master’s in Engineering Administration from Virginia Tech and a Master equivalent in Nuclear Engineering from the Bettis Reactor Engineering School. He also spent a year in the Marketing PhD program at Duke. Dave’s outside interests include triathlon, surfing, playing music, and building things - and he applies analytics to all of them.