Business Analysis (BFT 312/3)

The business analyst solves business problems. The business analyst adds value to the organization. The business analyst does this not by defining a set of requirements so that a solution development team, at the behest of a technical project manager, can use them; nor does he run interference between the business wonks on one side and the technology geeks on the other. Being a business analyst means one is in the center of change in the organization, and that is a dangerous place to be without a map, or at least a good plan of action, or perhaps a better escape route.

The trend is your friend is a practical principle often used by business managers, who seek to forecast future sales, expenditures, and profitability in order to make production and other operational decisions.  The problem is how best to identify and discover business trends and utilize trend information for attaining objectives of firms.This book contains an Excel-based solution to this problem, applying principles of the authors profit system model of the firm that enables forecasts of trends in sales, expenditures, profits and other business variables.  The program, called FIRM, which runs on Windows with Microsoft Excel 2010, useshistorical time series of total sales, total costs, and total assets of the firm from its financial statements (income statements and balance sheets), estimates relationships among these variables, and then employs the estimated relationships to forecasts trends in these vital business variables.  Featuring step-by-step case examples, the goal is to equip business managers and students with easy-to-use tools for understanding and forecasting trends in important business variables, thereby empowering them to make better business decisions.

Moral economy, as a set of rules which regulate market transactions, has been the object of much research and debate, both in recent years and amongst classical sociological authors. Weber in particular examined the rules of the moral economy in the financial markets, and this volume sheds light on his contribution to the subject.